Mother

mothers

Few terms in the depth-psychological corpus carry as much theoretical weight, clinical consequence, or mythological freight as ‘Mother.’ The literature ranges across at least four distinct registers: the empirical personal mother of developmental psychology; the archetypal Great Mother as a transpersonal, collectively inherited structure; the mother-complex as a pathological constellation arising from the interaction between the two; and the symbolic or cosmogonic Mother as first principle of being itself. Jung’s own contribution — most fully articulated in ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’ — establishes the mother archetype as the most differentiated of the feminine archetypes, paradoxically encompassing both the ‘loving and the terrible mother,’ and generating distinct complexes in son and daughter alike. Neumann extends this framework mythologically in ‘The Great Mother,’ mapping the archetype’s binary structure across world symbolism. Object-relations voices in this corpus — notably as filtered through Samuels, Kalsched, and Liz Greene’s discussion of Kleinian splitting — redirect attention to the actual dyadic encounter between infant and caregiver. Estés reclaims the instinctual mother through mythopoetic narrative; Harding examines maternal psychology from within a woman’s lived experience; Hillman interrogates the ‘parental fallacy’ that assigns the mother causal sovereignty over character. Across these positions, a central tension persists: how much is the Mother an internal psychic structure, and how much an irreducibly relational fact?

In the library 25 passages

The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason… On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons

Jung’s foundational statement of the mother archetype’s ambivalent structure, encompassing both the nurturing and the devouring poles under the formula ‘the loving and the terrible mother.’

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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The mother archetype forms the foundation of the so-called mother-complex… the child’s instincts are disturbed, and this constellates archetypes which, in their turn, produce fantasies that come between the child and its mother as an alien and often frightening element.

Jung argues that the mother-complex originates in the interplay between the real mother’s behavior and the archetypal mother, producing distorted fantasy formations that underlie neurosis.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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Identity with the Mother.— If a mother-complex in a woman does not produce an overdeveloped Eros, it leads to identification with the mother and to paralysis of the daughter’s feminine initiative… She prolongs her mother’s life by a sort of continuous blood transfusion.

Jung delineates one of the four daughter-variants of the mother-complex — identity with the mother — as a condition of psychic parasitism that arrests individuation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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The concrete reality of this archetypal world can be apprehended through its expressions in cult image and rite, in religion and customs… the purpose of Part I has been to work out the structure of what analytical psychology calls an archetype, and to explain this structure on the basis of the one archetype of the Feminine.

Neumann establishes the Great Mother as the paradigmatic case for understanding archetypal structure itself, grounding his analysis in cross-cultural symbolic evidence.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

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These problems of a ‘mother complex’ require a deeper sense of what mother is, and the knowledge that often we can best give maternal care to another, not by being mother ourselves, but by finding ways to stir the maternal impulse in the other.

Moore reframes the mother-complex therapeutically, arguing that genuine maternal care consists in evoking the other’s own capacity for self-nurturance rather than substituting oneself as mother.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis

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The Great Mother is one of the most important archetypes… A baby first experiences attachment and feelings of joy gazing into the mother’s (or father’s) eyes… This is the primal experience of the Great Mother who is ‘always there.’

Signell bridges the personal and archetypal registers by rooting the infant’s earliest relational experience in what becomes the psychological substrate for the Great Mother archetype.

Signell, Karen A., Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991supporting

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The infant is conceived of as separate from his mother from the moment of conception and he remains a separate person. His job is to establish relationship with his mother… infant and mother know each other as a whole.

Samuels contrasts Fordham’s developmental model — in which individuation begins from birth in relation to an actual mother — with Neumann’s uroboric merger hypothesis.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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The child actually ‘splits’ the mother into two different people: the good mother (or good breast) and the bad mother (or bad breast). You love and adore the good mother… and you hate and despise and want to destroy the bad mother.

Greene explicates Kleinian splitting in relation to the mother as the infantile mechanism underlying later polarized archetypal projections onto women.

Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting

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This Mother is not his real, mortal mother… the Mother that he is sensing beyond his own… is the Great Mother—the Goddess in her many forms in the myths and legends of many peoples and cultures.

Moore distinguishes between the personal mother who inevitably disappoints and the Great Mother as a transpersonal numinous source, arguing that conflation of the two produces the pathological mother complex in men.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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The way to cause a mother to collapse is to divide her emotionally… When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture, there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about that culture.

Estés frames the mother’s psychological collapse as a product of cultural coercion that forces an impossible split between maternal instinct and social conformity.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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In our story the duck mother is cut away, forced away from her instincts… the duckling’s ‘otherness’ begins to jeopardize the mother’s safety in her own community, and she tucks her head and dives.

Through the Ugly Duckling tale Estés dramatizes how community pressure psychically divides the instinctual mother, causing her to withdraw care from the exceptional or alien child.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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These human ‘Goddess-mothers’… constituted an essential female-to-female nutritional system that nourished the Jung mothers in particular, teaching them how to nourish the psyches and souls of their Jung in return.

Estés reconstructs a pre-institutional lineage of feminine initiatory transmission through which older women passed instinctual maternal knowledge to younger mothers.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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Suppose a child is afraid of its mother… If there is nothing of this kind to explain the fear, then I would suggest that the situation be regarded as an archetypal one… The child now dreams of the mother as a witch who pursues children.

Jung uses childhood fear of the mother as an exemplary case for recognizing when an archetypal constellation — rather than biographical cause — is operative in a psychic reaction.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting

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The rapprochement phase may be crucial to the child’s ability to internalize conflict and to reconcile clashes between an ‘all good’ mother and an ‘all bad’ one.

Within an object-relations framework applied to addiction treatment, Flores identifies the rapprochement subphase as the developmental crucible in which the split maternal imago must be integrated.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting

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It is through his complete dependence and weakness that the infant is most closely endeared to the mother. This very dependence is paradoxically the great power of the weak. The child becomes ‘King Baby’!

Harding traces the paradox by which the infant’s absolute helplessness exerts tyrannical power over the mother, a dynamic she connects to the developmental task of gradually releasing mutual dependency.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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The newborn infant establishes a need-satisfying [relationship] between itself and the mother by suckling at the breast or bottle while being securely held by the pleasurable sensations of the mother’s smell, warm touch, tender sounds and adoring gaze.

Kalsched, following Winnicott, describes the early mother-infant dyad as the somatic and affective matrix within which the self first coheres — and against which trauma registers most devastatingly.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting

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I wouldn’t ever contest the impression of a mother’s character, whatever it be, makes upon her natural-born child. She is so indub[itably influential]…

Hillman concedes the mother’s formative influence while redirecting the frame toward the acorn theory, arguing that the daimon selects its parents rather than being created by them.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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This kind of radical opposition to the conventional mother appears in the biographies of the composer Igor Stravinsky, for instance, and the photographer Diane Arbus.

Hillman documents through biographical cases the recurrent pattern in which the creative genius requires — and is served by — a mother who embodies the values the daimon must oppose.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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During the infancy and early childhood of her family the mother runs a great risk of losing all contact with interests which occupy the time and attention of those who are not exclusively concerned as she is with the needs of babies.

Harding addresses the psychological cost of total maternal immersion, arguing that a mother’s individuation requires preserving space for her own development apart from the children.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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The queen mother/crone in this tale is the king’s mother… she is that black soil glittering with mica, black hairy roots, and all life that has gone before, broken down into a fragrant sludge of humus.

Estés maps the elder mother/crone figure onto a chthonic fecundity that precedes and exceeds the personal mother, connecting her to the archaic ground of psychic life.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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The pattern of mother-daughter constitutes a perpetual danger, however, to the psychological growth of the friends, for it tends to hold at least one of them, and generally each of them alternately, in the position of child to mother.

Harding extends the mother-daughter dynamic into adult female friendship, warning that unconscious maternal transference between women impedes individuation for both parties.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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The sea was the Mother, the people, she was not anything. She was when she was, darkly.

Campbell’s anthology of cosmogonic hymns positions the Mother as the primordial undifferentiated ground preceding creation, corroborating the depth-psychological archetype through comparative mythology.

Campbell, Joseph, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 2013aside

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Demeter’s pain, neurotic activities, and rage accompany, and therefore serve, the soul’s visit to the underworld… Persephone returns to her mother and tells her, as any daughter would, all the details of her abduction.

Moore reads the Demeter-Persephone myth as teaching that the mother’s grief and rage are not pathological but serve the soul’s necessary descent, framing maternal suffering as itself soul-making.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside

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The dependence of the child upon the mother is a reality. And the position of dependence involves, inevitably, submission to the authority of the one depended on.

Harding grounds the mother’s authority not in sentiment but in the existential reality of the child’s dependency, arguing that the mother mediates external reality to the child before the child can encounter it directly.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970aside

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