Mother (Wolff)

Definition

The Mother, in Toni Wolff’s essay “Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche”, is one of four forms in which, she proposed, a woman’s psyche organises its relation to the world. Wolff set the four on two crossed axes. On the personal axis stand the Mother and the Hetaira, each defined by a relation to people; on the impersonal axis stand the Amazon, turned towards work and the outer world, and the Medial woman, turned towards the unconscious. The Mother is the form turned towards whatever needs care: the child first, but also anyone or anything that is young, weak or still growing. Her readers say she relates to a man chiefly as father of the family rather than as an individual, which is the Hetaira’s ground.

Each form, for Wolff, has a fitting and an unfitting expression. At its best the Mother shelters, nourishes and helps others develop; at its worst care becomes anxiety and control, children are kept dependent, and a woman lives her own unlived life through them. Wolff assumed that every woman carries all four forms, that one leads, that a second from the other axis follows, and that the form opposite the leading one, for the Mother the Hetaira, stays least developed. Two things the definition excludes. Wolff’s Mother is a form of a woman’s conscious orientation, not the archetypal Great Mother of the collective unconscious, though her readers tie the two together. And the form is Wolff’s, not Jung’s.

History

Wolff (1888–1953), Jung’s patient from 1910 and then his collaborator, led the Psychological Club in Zürich for seventeen years (Molton & Sikes 2011, pp. 5–7). Her essay was printed in German as “Strukturformen der weiblichen Psyche” in Der Psychologe (Bern) in 1951, and Paul Watzlawik’s English translation was privately printed for students of the C. G. Jung Institute in July 1956 (Hall 1980, bibliography). The German was collected in Studien zu C. G. Jungs Psychologie (1959), with an introduction by Jung (CW 10); the English was reprinted in Psychological Perspectives in 1995, and a new English edition of her essays appeared in 2021. The framework row gives the shared history.

The essay is older than its printing. Wolff’s own first note says it was first read to the Psychological Club in Zürich in 1934 and given in a fuller version at the C. G. Jung Institute in 1948 (1956 translation, endnote 1; the German text in Studien carries the same note). Molton and Sikes report the 1934 reading (2011, p. 3 n. 2), and Peggy Vermeesch both dates (2021). The secondary dates that disagree are slips against that note: Molton and Sikes’s own chronology gives the 1934 Club slot to a paper on individuation in women and makes 1948 the first reading of the structural forms (2011, p. 7); Nor Hall dates the essay to 1934 in her preface but to 1932 in her chapter on the Hetaira (1980, p. 153); and Sylvia Perera’s “Zurich, 1946” (1981, n. 11) cites a printed copy, most likely the Zürich printing of 1956.

Wolff did not derive the Mother from myth. Hall says she reached her conclusions in the consulting room (1980, preface). The mythological dress came from her readers. Edward Whitmont gave the scheme its widest English circulation in The Symbolic Quest (1969), where he made the Mother the collective form of personal relating and matched her to the images of the Great Mother, nourishing or devouring “regardless of the individual” (1991 printing, p. 179). Earlier in the same chapter he set her beside Julius Evola’s Demetric type of femininity (p. 176). He was also the first to propose a masculine counterpart, the Father (pp. 181–182). He insisted that the form was one channel among several:

The role of the mother is a manifestation of femininity in a perfectly valid, essential and vital form; it is a collective form, which has its place but is by no means the only channel through which the feminine may express and fulfill itself. — Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest (1969; 1991 printing), p. 180

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Anthony Stevens repeats Whitmont’s account, naming the Great Mother, Natura and Demeter as the pole’s images (2002, pp. 211–212). Hall gives the Mother three of her chapters (1980). Mary Dian Molton and Lucy Anne Sikes, in the only book-length study, open their account of the Mother with Hannah, who weeps for a child in First Samuel (2011, pp. 10–11) and give her seven chapters.

The debate

The obvious neighbour among the classical ten is the great mother, and the two are often run together. Jung’s mother archetype is a content of the collective unconscious that appears in images in men and women alike. Wolff’s Mother is a way a woman’s conscious adaptation is structured, nearer to a type in the sense of Jung’s Psychological Types than to an archetype. Whitmont nevertheless called the whole typology archetypal (1991 printing, p. 178), and that reading has stuck. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992, appendix C) argued the opposite way: the Mother is too narrow to be a deep structure, a facet of what they call the Queen, who in their scheme carries the teaching, discipline and erotic love that the Mother lacks.

The general criticism of the typology bears hardest on the Mother. Whitmont himself put it most sharply in 1982:

Wolff’s types have been criticized, and rightly so, for characterizing the feminine primarily in terms of relationship to the male, hence making it dependent or secondary to the masculine. — Edward C. Whitmont, Return of the Goddess (1982), p. 140

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

He renamed the Mother “Luna”, an attunement to concrete life that need not involve children (p. 140). Mary Ann Mattoon observed that Wolff writes only about the female psyche, with men left out of the account (1981, p. 90, as cited in Samuels 1985), and Andrew Samuels judged that the scheme kept the confusion between sex and gender (1985, ch. 7). Perera asked that the forms be read inwardly, as mothering one’s own feminine depths rather than outer partners and children (1981, n. 11), and Marion Woodman called mothering the “sacred cow” of the culture (1982, p. 122).

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Demeter (1984) is the nearest of her goddess types. The match was drawn by earlier readers rather than by Wolff: Whitmont through Evola’s Demetric type, John Sanford by giving the Mother Demeter as her governing goddess (1980, pp. 110–111). Bolen draws on Wolff only for the Hetaira, which she sets beside her Aphrodite (1984, p. 230), and her note cites Wolff’s “A Few Thoughts on the Process of Individuation in Women” (Spring, 1941), not the structural-forms essay.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the Mother as a psychological construct, and no validated instrument measures Wolff’s forms. The self-typing chapter in Molton and Sikes (2011, p. 24) is a guide, not a test. Monika Górowska (2025) proposes, without data, that Wolff’s forms could be read against trait models of personality.

Appearances

The form appears mainly in Jungian practice and workshops, and in readings of film and fiction. Molton and Sikes use Bagdad Café (1987), in which a childless woman brings care to a desert motel, as the healthy form; Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) for a Mother who looks after everyone but herself and her husband; and the BBC film of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1983) for its darker side, a will over those she loves (2011, p. 11). Hall’s Mother chapters work through Palaeolithic figurines, mothers and daughters, and the Eleusinian rites (1980, chs 3–5). These are their authors’ readings, not Wolff’s examples.

Sources

• Wolff, T. (1951). Strukturformen der weiblichen Psyche. Der Psychologe, 3(7/8), 303–315. Bibliographic record: https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/?p=20504
• Wolff, T. (1956). Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche (P. Watzlawik, Trans.). Privately printed for the students of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich. Endnote 1 (dates of the 1934 and 1948 readings) checked in the scan held by the University of Florida Digital Collections, https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/AA/00/00/15/82/00001/AA00001582_00001.pdf. Reprinted (1995) in Psychological Perspectives, 31(1), 77–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332929508404852
• Wolff, T. (1959). Studien zu C. G. Jungs Psychologie. Rhein-Verlag; Daimon reissue. ISBN 978-3-85630-006-7. With Jung’s introduction, CW 10.
• Wolff, T. (2021). Essays of Analytical Psychology. Daimon Verlag. ISBN 978-3-85630-623-6.
• Molton, M. D., & Sikes, L. A. (2011). Four Eternal Women: Toni Wolff Revisited, A Study in Opposites. Fisher King Press. ISBN 978-1-926715-31-5. Pp. 3–11, 24; chapters 1–7.
• Healy, N. S. (2017). Toni Wolff and C. G. Jung: A Collaboration. Tiberius Press. ISBN 978-0-9981128-0-0.
• Vermeesch, P. (2021, August). Toni Wolff’s structural forms of the feminine psyche. Jungian Psychology Space. https://www.cgjung.net/espace/jps/articles/peggy-vermeesch/toni-wolff-structural-forms-feminine-psyche/
• Whitmont, E. C. (1969). The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology. Putnam for the C. G. Jung Foundation; Princeton University Press printing with revisions and afterword, 1991. ISBN 978-0-691-02454-7. Chapter 11, pp. 176–184.
• Whitmont, E. C. (1982). Return of the Goddess. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0000-6. Pp. 140–141.
• Hall, N. (1980). The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-090793-8. Preface; pp. 33–34, 153; chapters 3–5; bibliography.
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 7, “The search for the feminine”.
• Mattoon, M. A. (1981). Jungian Psychology in Perspective. Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-920440-5. P. 90, as cited in Samuels (1985).
• Stevens, A. (2002). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Chapter 11, pp. 211–212.
• Sanford, J. A. (1980). The Invisible Partners. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-2277-6. Pp. 103ff and 110–111, drawing on P. Zabriskie, “Goddesses in our midst”, Quadrant 17 (1974).
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The King Within: Accessing the King in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09591-8. Appendix C, “Archetypes and the Anima”.
• Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-05-2. Notes, n. 11.
• Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-11-3. P. 122.
• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapter 11, “The Alchemical Goddess”, pp. 229–230 (Wolff’s hetaira; “hetaira woman”, 230, in the index), and the note there citing Wolff (1941). Via Internet Archive full-text search of the 1984 printing: https://archive.org/details/goddessesinevery00jean
• Górowska, M. P. (2025). Archetypy Toni Wolff jako pomost między modelem cech a tożsamością narracyjną. In J. Felczak (Ed.), Przekraczanie granic między sferami egzystencji, t. 1. Wydawnictwo WSB-NLU. https://repozytorium.wsb-nlu.edu.pl/handle/11199/11393