What's the Matter with Mother?

‘We have a name for the display of images, we call it BODY. Soul is the name for the MODE of experience that understands this to be true. What we call a body is the display of the soul’.

- Mordechai Brodie, personal notes from lectures.

Before Sigmund Freud, childhood was not widely understood as the primary site of psychological formation. Children were often regarded as incomplete adults in need of moral discipline, with little attention given to their inner emotional lives or the lasting effects of early caregiving. Freud introduced a major shift by proposing that the foundations of adult personality are established in early childhood, and that the child’s earliest relationships—most often within the Oedipal triad of mother, father, and child—are central to this process. In doing so, he established the idea that development unfolds over time, and that early experience has lasting psychological consequences. Freud further suggested that these experiences are not simply remembered consciously but become internalised in the unconscious, forming templates for how we relate to others and ourselves. According to his theory, these internalised patterns shape emotional regulation, expectations of care, the capacity for intimacy, and our basic orientation toward the world.

Freud’s ideas gave rise to multiple trajectories. Within developmental psychology, researchers sought empirical accounts of how early experience—particularly attachment to caregivers—contributes to later psychological functioning, giving rise to approaches such as attachment theory. Carl Jung, meanwhile, extended Freud’s work in a different direction. Building upon Freud’s use of the Oedipus myth to understand psychological life—and his later, more tentative reach for mythological language in concepts like Eros and the death drive—Jung proposed that the psyche is inherently mythological. He developed the concept of archetypes—universal patterns that structure human perception and experience—and argued that the image we hold of our personal mother, and of those who do or do not mother us internally, is shaped not only by personal experience but by collective patterns that exceed, in scope and exaggeration, the reality of any individual parent.

Many contemporary Jungians have since incorporated an almost Freudian emphasis on early childhood into their understanding of the personal parents’ role in shaping the psyche. Indeed, much contemporary therapeutic practice appears intent on recreating the parent-child dyad in order to heal these “original wounds.” However, an unconscious reliance upon the developmental model can inadvertently stick us back in a place where life is linear and causal, where parents are to blame for all our suffering, and where we get stuck forever explaining and understanding ourselves as children in relation to them.

For Jung, the actual parents mattered because they become the first carriers of our archetypal images, not because they are the ultimate cause of our development. Rather than viewing childhood as the origin of psychological problems, thinkers staying close to his proposition suggest that our “developmental” experiences serve the daemon—the innate pattern or calling that draws us toward the life we are called to live. This perspective resonates with a number of Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, in which our parents are understood as precisely those through whom our destiny unfolds. From this perspective, life (including ourselves and our ancestors) is not, and is not obliged to be, organised according to an externally projected, utopian notion of perfection for us to succeed as adults, or to live out our destinies. The acorn already contains the image of the tree it is becoming, and our circumstances participate in the unfolding of that image.

Such a perspective frees us from the compulsion to resolve our relationship with our parents, or to explain our suffering, complexes, and perceived shortcomings solely through childhood. Instead, it invites us to enter the world as we are—strange, limited, and afflicted, like the gods themselves—and to approach our lives through richer and more complex images than those of health or pathology. It helps us avoid the inflated notion of who we should - or could - have been if our upbringing and our parents been more in line with the fantasy of perfection Of Eden. It invites us to “grow downwards” into our destiny, cultivating an imagination and an ethics that extend beyond moralistic ideas of good and bad, innocence and guilt, success and failure1.

So why does the image of the mother come to occupy such a central place in the therapeutic imagination?

Following Patricia Berry’s writings on Gaia in Echo’s Subtle Body, we begin with the recognition that, mythologically, Mother as Gaia-Earth is both matter—the clay from which we and all things came—and the psychological ground on which consciousness stakes itself as real2. It is the reality around which our most fundamental assumptions about meaning and identity is constellated. Yet while Mother belongs to the material and the real, she is also chaos and the void. From a Jungian perspective, we could say this is partly because archetypes arrive with their opposites, but also because Mother, as matrix—as maya, the image that makes reality and vice versa—is inherently unstable, always both form and absence, wave and particle. If Mother is the ground of our sense of mattering—of how we make meaning and what we subconsciously take to be true, on which we build our own sense of coherency—she is equally the lack experienced when that very ground beneath us gives way. In the shattering of all we have defined our self and world by, we have no sensation with which to parse new form, nothing to hold on to, and no co-ordinates by which to understand our place in the world. The earth, absented, seems void of image or coordinates from which we can orient ourselves and make sense.
While many animist traditions have cultivated ritualistic, communal, and embodied ways of entering into relationship with this instability, opacity of the body, and void, much of the modern West has sought instead to master or escape it. As a condition for and justification of ecological exploitation, Western patriarchal consciousness positioned matter as inferior to spirit: inert, passive, and available for domination. It limited its recognition of consciousness to the human - as defined by whomever believes themselves to be custodian of its definition and form. Such assumptions have enabled the exploitation of women’s reproductive labour, the transformation of bodies into instruments of production (especially the brown or black body of the colonial “other”) by privileging ”human” »consciousness, and the treatment of the earth as dumb capital. This form of modern consciousness fixates on the literal and trusts only what can be seen and therefore quantified. It distrusts the discomfort experienced as we approximate our own lack or ‘the other’ within or without, as opaque. We have thus further elevated Mother as the “real” - severing image from the material - whilst simultaneously becoming estranged from, and afraid of, the mystery arising from the depths of her as our own body/ matter.

For as matter (mater - mother) / ground, she is also flesh, with its seemingly irrational desires, fears, and vulnerabilities that upwell precognitively and beyond egoic control. Her apparent irrationality and proximity to death threatens the ego’s desire for clarity, so she is also often experienced as terrible confusion or lack, her proximity met with defence and fear. As the material that creates our human form, she is the clay itself, building body as womb. Thus, she is also experienced as the shame for which there is no cure—for potential that is materialised is, by definition, limited and mortal. The privileging of transcendence, domination, and control over matter and body, means Mother’s ambiguity becomes intolerable, often provoking extreme cultural neurosis—including in our psychological approaches. We mistake ‘integration’ and ‘wholeness’ for the goal of psychological life, rather than recognising them as only two archetypal images among many. Like two images that are mirages in the face of her inherent instability.

No surprise then, that heroic imagination has become one of the West’s dominant psychological myths. So much so that those who see with it have tried to organise all narrative into its structure. It is a story of overcoming, rising above, and escaping depth, death, and limitation. When descent is acknowledged (as is now the fad) it is often with an outward goal of furthering knowledge through the image of wholeness, for to colonise the underworld is to attempt to ‘know it. Or self improvement, so we can emerge purified in three days and transcend as Christ did - resurrection always in mind. In attempting to colonise the unconscious and its ‘dark spaces’, we seek to overcome rather than enter into relationships of tension and paradox with our own multi-consciousness and experiences of dismemberment, the void, and the limits of egoic certainty. Mother thus becomes the dragon to overcome, keeping us psychologically as hero-children, whether in reaction to her excess, her absence, or her inherent ambiguity.

To defend against Mother, archetypally speaking—to attempt to cure or overcome her (and by extension, our own childish reactions to her)—is itself archetypal. When we take her literalisms to be true, we remain as her children did according to Gaia’s myth - stuck inside her3. This includes defending against everything that rises through the body as chaos, contradiction, inferior feeling, and the polymorphous life of the unconscious. This inner misogyny often precedes and fuels the outer. One form of it is the blame we place upon our actual mothers for our conditions of discomfort, absence, and confusion -becoming fixated on victimhood and the (inflated) fantasy of who we might have been had our upbringing been sufficiently perfect (another heroic fantasy – but this time hero is defeated). Rather than allowing our unique suffering to shape the ethics of our participation in the world, we remain psychologically infantile, endlessly circling a fantasy of our original wounds as explanation for why our lives cannot yet begin.

By examining Mother’s archetypal impact within a grander mythological matrix and in ritual space rather than simply that of the personal and developmental, by giving her image back to the gods that hold her body and weight as Berry does in her two essays on Gaia and Demeter, we pull some of the pressure away from the personal mother and turn towards the work of meeting her ambiguity, materiality, and sense of lack within ourselves. This includes discovering ways of relating to experiences that do not yet have recognisable or desirable shape, and of being held within their tension and discomfort without trying to cure them.

About the Author:

The author of this post is Nico Athene. Her engagement with the negotiated space of the between and the embodied imaginal is informed by ritual performance, archetypal psychology, contact improvisation, butoh dance, and workshops exploring consent-through-touch. With a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town, Athene began her inquiry into embodiment and the power of social imagining, developing it further through a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, awarded with distinction. Her thesis, Approximating Unknowns as an Ethics Towards Encountering Difference, explored archetypes of the ecological body and included improvised scenes of dialogue and enmeshment with (in)animate landscapes as a means of deconstructing colonial subject-object relations.

She now works as a visual artist (painting and performance) and facilitator of psychosocial inquiry through the body. Athene has performed as a professional dancer in multiple ritual productions, including several by Brett Bailey and a collaboration with Tossie van Tonder, and has exhibited her work in numerous galleries. She has taught privately, at the University of the Witwatersrand under a grant from the Centre for the Humanities and Arts, at Baard University, and for the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies. Her ongoing study of butoh and post-Jungian theory continues to inform her exploration of the imagining body as a mode of knowing, and as the site through which we meet the animate cosmos and the mysteries of soul.

Upcoming Courses:

The Centre for Applied Jungian Studies will host Nico Athene as she presents a course on the topic of this article. Starting Saturday 12 September, this 6-week course is an online exploration of the Mother archetype through lectures, somatic workshops, and seminars. You can find out more and register here.

‘What’s the Matter with Mother?’ is the first of three courses that will be presented in Psyche & Eros. This programme seeks to explore and revision the founding mythologies that have shaped almost a century and a half of psychoanalytic practice. To find out more about the full programme, follow the link here.

Follow Nico’s work on Instagram under the handle @nicoathene