Great Mother

Definition

The mother archetype, in Jung’s usage, is the inherited readiness to experience and to picture “the mother”: not the woman who raised a person, to whom Jung attributed only a limited causal role, but the figure that is projected on to her and lends her a mythological background and authority. Its images run from the personal mother to the goddess, the church, the earth and the sea, and on the dark side to the witch, the dragon, the grave and anything that devours. The Great Mother is this archetype in its mythological form: the goddess who gives birth, nourishes and protects, and who also withholds, swallows and kills, the two faces being, for Jung and his followers, one figure and not two.

The name needs a note. Jung’s own term was the mother archetype. “Great Mother”, he said, belongs to comparative religion, is rarely met in the consulting room, and is a derivative of the archetype rather than the archetype itself; it became the standard name through Neumann’s monograph of 1955. Jung also made the figure a structural counterpart: where a man’s psychology is completed by the Wise Old Man, a woman’s is completed by the Chthonic Mother.

History

The dark half came first, and so did the name, in passing. Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912, English 1916) reads the hero’s struggle as the struggle to leave the mother, and calls the image that bars the way the “terrible mother”: the Sphinx, the devouring sea monster, the city as tomb. “The great mother” occurs there without capitals, in the oracle to Deucalion and Pyrrha to throw “the bones of the great mother” behind them, and in a note on the priests of Attis castrating themselves “in the service of the great mother”. A dating caveat applies: CW 5, Symbols of Transformation, translates the 1952 rewrite, so its wording cannot be dated to 1912; the Hinkle translation is the early witness. The 1934 lecture “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” makes the mother a symbol of the collective unconscious itself, “the source of the water of life”, and the first carrier of the anima image (The Integration of the Personality, 1939, pp. 113–114).

The dedicated statement is the 1938 Eranos lecture “Die psychologischen Aspekte des Mutterarchetypus”, revised in 1954 and collected in CW 9i (¶148–198). It opens by handing the Great Mother to comparative religion and tracing the image back to the mother archetype (¶148), insists that an archetype is determined in form and not in content (¶155), lists the archetype’s aspects from the personal mother to “the goddess, and especially the Mother of God, the Virgin, and Sophia” (¶156), and gives the witch, the dragon, the grave and deep water as the same archetype’s other face (¶157–158). Its clinical position separates Jung from the psychoanalysis of his day:

My own view differs from that of other medico-psychological theories principally in that I attribute to the personal mother only a limited aetiological significance. This is to say, all those influences which the literature describes as being exerted on the children do not come from the mother herself, but rather from the archetype projected upon her, which gives her a mythological background and invests her with authority and numinosity. — C. G. Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1938/1954), CW 9i ¶159, as quoted in Brewster (2018)

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The essay nonetheless tells the analyst to look first to the mother for the causes of infantile neurosis (¶159) and makes the archetype the foundation of the mother complex (¶161). Its account of that complex is of its period and should be read as Jung’s: the typical effects on a son are given as homosexuality, Don Juanism and sometimes impotence (¶162), with a positive side in a finely differentiated Eros and a bold manliness (¶164–165); the daughter’s complex is sorted into four types, from hypertrophy of the maternal instinct to resistance to the mother (¶167–170). Aion (1951) uses the mythological name directly:

The mythological Great Mothers are usually a danger to their sons. — C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii ¶174

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In Aion the Chthonic Mother also completes a woman’s marriage quaternio where a man’s has the Wise Old Man (¶42), and Miriam would carry “the significance of the Great Mother” in a woman’s quaternio (¶329).

Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949, English 1954), with a foreword by Jung, placed a matriarchal phase ruled by the Great Mother between the uroboros and the hero’s separation. His The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955, Bollingen XLVII) is the book the name now refers to: a diagram of the Archetypal Feminine on two axes, Good Mother against Terrible Mother and positive against negative transformation, with plates from the Venus of Willendorf to Kali. In The Child (1973) he made the mother the carrier of the infant’s self, activated by “the personal evocation of the archetype”. Later systems adapted the figure rather than renaming it: Jean Shinoda Bolen’s goddess typology (1984) gives Demeter the mother’s place, and Carol Pearson’s twelve-archetype scheme (1991) has a Caregiver covering the same ground in another vocabulary.

The debate

Neumann’s elaboration drew the first fire. Michael Fordham (1981), from the developmental school, objected that if the self means the totality and the mother is the baby’s self, then there is no baby; he would accept only that the mother is, to the baby, a part of the self.

The ethological reading is Anthony Stevens’ (1982, revised 2003). Stevens came to Jung from John Bowlby, for whom the child’s tie to its mother is instinctive rather than learned. His chapter on the mother treats the archetype as an inner dynamic in the phylogenetic psyche, not an innate picture, actualised by a continuously present mother; the Good Great Mother and the Terrible Mother are its two poles, so that the child is “phylogenetically forewarned” of the mother’s dual nature.

The emergent reading is Jean Knox’s (2003), and the mother is the archetype her model explains most readily. Attachment research supplies the mechanism, but as Bowlby’s internal working models built from experience, not as Stevens’ instinct. Knox finds Stevens’ discrete mother archetype too rich in built-in content and replaces it with an image schema:

Thus, there may be no such thing as an archetypal mother but, instead, there is an image schema of containment. A child’s experience of his or her mother as physically and psychologically containing is a metaphorical extension of this image schema, or archetype-as-such. — Jean Knox, Archetype, Attachment, Analysis (2003), p. 64

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The goddess imagery, on this account, is later metaphorical elaboration, cultural and not inherited.

The feminist critique turns on the “archetypal feminine”. Naomi Goldenberg (1976) objected to archetypes, the feminine among them, being treated as eternal givens rather than as images open to change; Demaris Wehr (1987) read them as social arrangements given a sacred warrant. Samuels (1985) asks whether the women-centred books of Perera, Woodman and Ulanov idealise the innately feminine; “Beyond the feminine principle” (1989) and Politics on the Couch (2001) call the goddess literature essentialist and ask why women should be required to be nourishing, containing, earthy goddesses at all. Polly Young-Eisendrath (1984, 1997) treats the feminine of Jungian theory as a cultural construction and the goddess as, in part, a projection. A cultural reading from inside the tradition is Fanny Brewster’s (2018): she grants the mother archetype “great merit” on the strength of its mythology, then presses on whose images count, following Isis as “She Who Weeps” and the Yoruba Yemoja into the archetypal grief of enslaved mothers.

Empirical status

Narrow. One peer-reviewed study has operationalised the mother image. Alan Maloney (1999) asked 151 adults to rate their preferences for images representing archetypal themes, the Mother among them, and factor-analysed the ratings; the factors were consistent with the hypothesis that archetypal themes shape affective response. The study cannot separate an inherited disposition from a learned one, has not been replicated, and measures preference for pictures, not a structure in the psyche. The adjacent mainstream research is attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969), claimed by both sides of the Jungian argument; it studies behaviour and the models built from it, not inherited images.

Appearances

Neumann’s book is itself the catalogue, and most later lists derive from its plates. Jung’s essay names Demeter and Kore and the Cybele and Attis myth (CW 9i ¶156) and Kali as “the loving and terrible mother” (¶158). Demeter and Persephone are the Greek case, with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as primary text. Isis, mourning Osiris and raising Horus, is the figure Jung used in 1912; Apuleius’ Golden Ass is the primary text, and Neumann’s Amor and Psyche (1956) reads Aphrodite there as the Great Mother with her son-lover. Kali is Stevens’ example of the Terrible Mother; Sylvia Brinton Perera (1981) pairs her with Ereshkigal, who kills her sister Inanna. On the dark side the fairy-tale witch stands in: Baba Yaga in von Franz’s Russian tales, the witch of “Rapunzel” in Kalsched (1996). In each case the Great Mother is a reading laid over an older figure; only Neumann and his readers wrote with the concept in hand.

Sources

• Jung, C. G. (1912). Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. English as Psychology of the Unconscious (B. M. Hinkle, Trans., 1916), Part II chapters IV, V (note 537) and VII, “The Dual Mother Rôle”. Project Gutenberg #65903. Rewritten 1952 as Symbols of Transformation, CW 5.
• Jung, C. G. (1934). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. CW 9i. English in The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans., 1939), pp. 113–114. Farrar & Rinehart.
• Jung, C. G. (1954). Psychological aspects of the mother archetype (Eranos lecture 1938, revised 1954). CW 9i ¶148–198, read in Four Archetypes (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.), Princeton University Press edition 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-15049-9; ¶156 and ¶159 as quoted in Brewster (2018), ¶155 as quoted in Stevens (2003), ¶162–170 as quoted in Sharp (1991).
• Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶42, ¶174, ¶329. Princeton University Press.
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Mother complex”.
• Neumann, E. (1949). The Origins and History of Consciousness (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 1954). Princeton University Press edition 1995. ISBN 978-0-691-01761-7.
• Neumann, E. (1955). The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (R. Manheim, Trans.). Princeton University Press edition 1972. ISBN 978-0-691-01780-8.
• Neumann, E. (1956). Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01772-3.
• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment (Attachment and Loss, vol. 1). Basic Books edition 1982. ISBN 978-0-465-00543-7.
• Goldenberg, N. R. (1976). A feminist critique of Jung. Signs, 2(2), 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1086/493369
• Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-05-2.
• Fordham, M. (1981). Neumann and childhood. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 26(2), 99–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1981.00099.x
• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
• Young-Eisendrath, P. (1984). Hags and Heroes: A Feminist Approach to Jungian Psychotherapy with Couples. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-17-5.
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapters 5 and 7.
• Wehr, D. S. (1987). Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6734-5.
• Samuels, A. (1989). The Plural Psyche: Personality, Morality and the Father. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-01760-2. Chapter 6, “Beyond the feminine principle”.
• Pearson, C. S. (1991). Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250678-8.
• Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7. Chapter on Rapunzel.
• Young-Eisendrath, P. (1997). Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora. Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-0-89096-746-1.
• Maloney, A. (1999). Preference ratings of images representing archetypal themes: an empirical study of the concept of archetypes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44(1), 101–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/1465-5922.00070
• Samuels, A. (2001). Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life. Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-86197-219-4.
• Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-129-7. Chapter 3, pp. 62–65.
• Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Personal introduction and chapter 7, “The mother”, pp. 104–128, which quotes Neumann’s The Child (1973).
• Brewster, F. (2018). Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-78906-6. Chapter 2, “The mother archetype”.
• Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Apuleius (2nd century). The Golden Ass (W. Adlington, Trans., 1566). Project Gutenberg #1666.