Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Grandmother’ operates on at least three distinguishable registers that rarely collapse into one another. At the mythological-archetypal level, she figures as the primordial ancestress — Nokomis falling from the moon in Jung’s reading of Hiawatha, La Loba as the bone-collecting crone in Estés, Baba Yaga as the terrifying but generative Wild Grandmother in Slavic lore — each a personification of the collective unconscious’s deepest maternal stratum. At the clinical-developmental level, she surfaces in Bowlby’s attachment research as surrogate caregiver for bereaved children and, in community trauma work, as the primary custodial figure for children whose biological mothers are absent through addiction or incarceration. Jung’s seminar material introduces a third register: the ‘great-grandmother’ as an impersonal, mythological figure surpassing the personal anima in numinous weight — the ‘grandest mother,’ as he puts it, whose emergence in a man’s dream signals trouble of a depth that transcends personal psychology. Hillman, by contrast, secularises the figure into a social-evolutionary argument about grandparenting as civilizational shelter. Taken together, these voices reveal that the Grandmother carries both the darkest underworld energies and the most sustaining transgenerational wisdom the psyche can mobilise.
the word ‘great-grandmother’… means a very grand mother or the grand grandmother, as the primitives would say, which means a great intensity, the very grandest mother. That is a v
Jung identifies the dream-figure of the great-grandmother as an impersonal, mythological archetype exceeding the anima in depth and psychic gravity.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
‘Grandmother, I come for fire. My house is cold… my people will die… I need fire.’ Baba Yaga snapped, ‘Oh yesssss, I know you, and your people.’
Estés stages the grandmother as the terrifying Wild Woman archetype from whom essential psychic fire — instinctual life-force — must be claimed through courage and initiation.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
as a girl his grandmother lived in the moon. One day when she was swinging on a grape-vine, a jealous lover cut it down, and Nokomis, Hiawatha’s grandmother, fell to earth.
Jung traces the mythological grandmother to a celestial, pre-human origin, grounding her archetypal status in cosmogonic narrative.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
this great-grandmother was there, backing her up, behind the figure of the grandmother. They were both mirrors of herself, and who she could be, as an older woman.
Signell demonstrates how grandmother and great-grandmother figures in women’s dreams function as projected images of the Wise Old Woman archetype, mirroring the dreamer’s potential self.
, Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991thesis
what is grand parenting, and how does one move from parenting to something grander? To answer this question is to take on the question posed at the beginning of this book: ‘Why do we live so long’
Hillman reframes the grandmother role as an evolutionary and civilizational function, arguing that post-reproductive endurance in women serves transgenerational cultural transmission.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
‘Grandmother, the arrow would not obey me and so I could not kill an elk.’ Then his grandmother said, ‘My grandson, that is not the way hunters act.’
In Winnebago trickster mythology, the grandmother consistently functions as the corrective cultural authority who instructs the naïve trickster-hero in the basic norms of human practice.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
‘Well, grandmother, will you carry the ribs then?’ ‘If I were to do that I am sure my ribs would grow long.’ Thereupon she began to sing: ‘Grandson, that I will pack’
Radin’s trickster cycle portrays the grandmother as a figure simultaneously manipulated and mysteriously autonomous, embodying the ambiguity of the archaic feminine in relation to the trickster’s chaotic energy.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
he changed his voice so that he could fool his grandmother and thus be able to eat the food alone… ‘Grandmother,’ he said afterwards, ‘a large number of people came to the feast’
The trickster’s repeated deception of the grandmother figure exposes the structural tension between the shapeshifting, boundary-violating trickster and the stabilising domestic-ancestral feminine.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
The grandmother received him and then turned her attention to the woman for the second child, but the second twin did not come out the normal way but from under his mother’s armpit.
Von Franz locates the grandmother at the threshold of creation itself, as the cosmogonic midwife who receives the primal twin beings at the moment of world-origination.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
A fortnight later on the way to school it was ‘My mommy is coming back’, but whispered so low that grandmother could hardly hear it.
Bowlby documents the grandmother as the primary attachment substitute and witness to a bereaved child’s mourning process, her presence structuring the child’s gradual accommodation to loss.
, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980supporting
Winnie was upset, too, when grandmother was away on vacation; she resorted to nose-picking and produced a sore. Any reference to someone dying also caused her anxiety.
Bowlby establishes that, following maternal loss, the grandmother becomes the child’s primary secure base, and her absence triggers somatic and anxiety symptoms analogous to the original bereavement.
, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980supporting
most children were being raised by a grandmother, occasionally an ‘auntie,’ who were generally in their forties or fifties… the substitute ‘mothers’ had five or six children from several of their daughters and sons
In trauma and community psychiatry contexts, the grandmother emerges as the central kinship-care figure absorbing the failures of the parental generation, carrying enormous and under-acknowledged psychological weight.
, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting
The grandmother took in Angelou and her brother and cared for them lovingly if sternly.
Rothschild foregrounds the grandmother as a resilience resource — a formative protective attachment figure whose stern but loving custodianship anchors a traumatised child’s survival and eventual flourishing.
, The body remembers Volume 2, Revolutionizing trauma, 2024supporting
in Gothic this awen- is by chance represented only by the feminine awo ‘grandmother’ (dative sing. awon); the masculine form is attested in the Icelandic afe ‘grandfather’.
Benveniste’s Indo-European linguistic analysis traces the etymology of ‘grandmother’ through Germanic kinship terminology, illuminating the structural position the figure occupies in ancestral classification systems.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside
she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place. She is circumspect, often hairy, always fat, and especially wishes to evade most company.
Estés introduces La Loba — the bone-woman — as an archetypal crone figure who prefigures and contextualises the grandmother motif as keeper of what is dead and potentially renewed.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside