Great Mother

Jung’s theory of archetypes led him to hypothesise
that the influences which a mother exerts on her children do not
necessarily derive from the mother herself as a person and her actual
character traits. In addition, there are qualities which the mother
seems to possess but which in fact spring from the archetypal structure
surrounding ‘mother’ and are projected onto her by the child
(see ARCHETYPE; PROJECTION).
The Great Mother is a naming of the general IMAGE, drawn from
COLLECTIVE cultural experience. As an image she reveals an archetypal
fullness but also a positive-negative polarity. An infant tends
to organise his experiences of early vulnerability and dependence
upon his mother round positive and negative poles. The positive pole
draws together such qualities as ‘maternal solicitude and sympathy;
the magical authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation
that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that
is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and
fertility’. In short, the good mother. The negative pole suggests the
bad mother: ‘anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of
the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying
and inescapable like fate’ (CW 9i, para. 158).
From a developmental perspective, this implies a splitting of the
maternal IMAGO (see OBJECT RELATIONS). Jung points out that such
contrasts are widespread in the cultural imagery of all peoples so
that mankind as a whole does not find it odd or unbearable that the
mother should be split. But eventually an infant has to come to terms
with his mother as a person and bring opposite perceptions of her
together, if he is to relate to her fully (see CONIUNCTlO; DEPRESSIVE
POSITION; INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD).
In addition to the dualisms of personal/archetypal and good/bad,
we must add that of earthy/spiritual: the Great Mother in her
chthonic, agricultural guise and in her divine, ethereal, virginal form.
This, too, has its reflection in the ordinary images of mother which
an infant develops.
It is important to understand the use of terms like the Great
Mother in developmental psychology in a metaphorical and not a
literal sense. There is no question but that an infant knows his

mother is not a fertility goddess or a destructive ‘Queen of the Night’;
however, he may relate to her as if she were such a figure.
Jung felt that the quality of the Great Mother image is different
for males and females. Because what is female is alien to a man, it
will tend to position itself in the UNCONSCIOUS and hence exert an
influence made greater by the fact of its being hidden. But a woman
shares the same conscious life as her mother and hence the mother
image is both less terrifying and less attractive to her than it is to a
male (see ANDROGYNE; ANIMA AND ANIMUS; ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN
MARY; GENDER; SEX). Here Jung may idealise the mother-daughter
relationship, overlooking its competitive aspect and seeing it from
the perspective of his time. Likewise, Jung draws a qualitative distinction
between the mother archetype and the father archetype
which, it might be argued, also reflects his own culture.
The fundamental nature of the mother-infant relationship means
that the Great Mother, as a cultural and historical phenomenon,
offers many stimulating aspects for investigation (e.g. Neumann,
1955). Some of these are only now beginning to be explored by
women.