This course turns toward the archetype that perhaps most profoundly structures psychic life, at least within the Western imagination: the mother. Beyond the personal mother, we examine the Great Mother as an organizing principle of psyche, tracing how she governs the territories of innocence and injury, nourishment and deprivation, descent and return.
The maternal archetype is not simply protective; it is also demanding, destructive, and inseparable from the cycles of chaos and order through which psychological life takes shape.
We explore these themes through the mother-daughter dyad of Demeter and Persephone, and later through Eve, the mythic mother of humanity.
Drawing on Jungian and post-Jungian thought, the course considers how maternal patterns shape the mythology of the child and the hero, some of the dynamics of the upperworld/underworld journey, and the therapeutic encounter itself. Neurosis emerges here as both a defense against rupture and the polymorphic universe. And rupture itself as a necessary force that deepens us into relationship with the instability, ambivalence, and imaginal reality of the mother image. As the archetype most closely associated with the mattering of our lives—mother, matrix, matter, mater—the mother image speaks directly to embodiment and our sense of being real.
Somatic sessions therefore form an essential part of this course, offering a way to investigate how our image of the maternal is lived and related to and through the body. By attending to the felt assumptions we take for granted, we begin to encounter the unconscious literalisms that ground our experience of self, world, and reality itself.
