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The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype
The Great Mother
The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Bollingen Series XLVII, 1955) is Neumann’s monographic study of the feminine archetype that presides over the pre-egoic stage of consciousness. Liebscher’s 2015 foreword names it “a watershed moment in the way archetypal studies would be conducted” — no previous Jungian monograph combined comparable detail with comparable structural rigor (Neumann 1955, par. 1).
The book’s structural innovation is its crossed-axis schema: the archetype of the Feminine is analyzed through an elementary character (containing, holding, nourishing, binding) and a transformative character (provoking change, initiation, ordeal), with further circles of elementary stage, transformative stage, and spiritual transformation (Neumann 1955, pars. 31, 34). The transformative character is traced iconographically across a chain of vessels: “the vessel in which this spiritual birth takes place appears as a magic vessel and as a vessel of transformation, as baptismal font, as grail, and finally as alchemistic retort” (Neumann 1955, par. 26).
Neumann takes Bachofen’s Mutterrecht as his classical-philological precedent but reframes it psychologically: the matriarchy is archetypal fact whether or not it is historical fact. The book is read today, in Liebscher’s phrase, “not as a contribution to a failed archaeological theory of an ancient cult of the Goddess, but as an exemplary study of archetypal psychology” (Neumann 1955, par. 1). Neumann himself, by his own admission, knew the study told “only one side of the story”; a planned complementary volume on the female psychology of the Great Mother remained unwritten at his death (Neumann 1955, par. 1).