Mothers: Idealization, Denigration, Speculation – Past, Present and Future  

by Professor Andrew Samuels

Analysts and psychotherapists may know less about the mother than they think they do! Archetypal theory and object relations contradict each other. The swing from a focus on the father to one on the mother has not helped us get rid of parental essentialism, in which their roles are sharply – and suspiciously contrasted. Are mother and father such ‘complementary opposites’? And at all times and in all cultures? For decades, feminists have pointed out that the therapies have indulged in an orgy of mother-blaming. And, I add, of unhelpful idealization of the mother. In the talk, I will try to get a balance of clinical utility and cultural exploration. Building the Psychic Body (embodiment workshops series) Nico Athene In this workshop series, we explore our relationship to the Mother archetype through the body, approaching her not as a fixed image but as unstable, shifting and generative ground—the creative matrix through which we dream, embody and make meaning of our lives, often unconsciously. From a post-Jungian perspective, the body is a primary site of image-making: a way of encountering both what seems concrete in life - literal and given- and what arises as autonomous images, felt as sensation and movement before we contain, justify, or control them with interpretation. This series offers another way of working, by deepening into our own matrix to explore our responses and symptoms not as something to be fixed, but as a requiem for the ways in which we uniquely make soul.        

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Building the Psychic Body (embodiment workshops series) 
by Nico Athene
 In this workshop series, we explore our relationship to the Mother archetype through the body, approaching her not as a fixed image but as unstable, shifting and generative ground—the creative matrix through which we dream, embody and make meaning of our lives, often unconsciously. From a post-Jungian perspective, the body is a primary site of image-making: a way of encountering both what seems concrete in life - literal and given- and what arises as autonomous images, felt as sensation and movement before we contain, justify, or control them with interpretation. This series offers another way of working, by deepening into our own matrix to explore our responses and symptoms not as something to be fixed, but as a requiem for the ways in which we uniquely make soul.


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Mother-a Complicated Relationship: parts 1 & 2:  interactive Student Seminars
by Stephen Anthony Farah

 In these seminars we will focus on the personal relationship with our respective mothers. We will bring them into the seminar space as historical, imaginary, and archetypal figures. Considering how we locate and relate to our mothers in our imaginal and psychic topographies. We will very gently (and somewhat gingerly) consider what we may have gained and lost in relationship to this most significant other, and how that now informs us in our relationships both to others and ourselves. These seminars will be an opportunity for relatively informal interaction, reflection and discussion about this theme: how “mother” lives in us and how this relationship may be unconsciously informing us.  

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The Matters of Mother: Three Mythologies
by Nan McAughey

Conventional psychology takes the view that the mind narrates what the nervous system knows—story follows state. We are physiologies first and psychologies second. Yet, the ancient Greeks, who had no depth psychology or psychopathology, knew that our lives go according to the narrative that is living us. They believed myths and archetypal figures predate us, taking deep hold of our emotions and thoughts to give form and meaning to our responses to the world. In this sense, psychology is myth in modern dress and myths give us psychological models through which to imagine human relations with the more-than-human forces that seize and shape our psychic life. Today, these forces are called instincts, drives, complexes. Cut off from knowing these invisible currents as powers that compel us, we tell stories that we want to be true, rather than the ones that are speaking through us. Complexity and mysteries of life are reduced to intelligible bytes of information requiring material proof. The body becomes defined as a static thing to be controlled with tests, pills and procedures. Caught in these literalisms, we become possessed by our passions rather than reflected within them. In a series of audio-visual presentations, we explore three faces of the Mother archetype as generative ancestor of what matters—the materiality at the root of every mother-child relationship, split off and over-literalized into the materialist culture that shapes us still today.    

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The Foul Soil: Learning to Rot in Mother’s House
by Siobhan Brodie

The Foul Soil enters the maternal not as biography, but as psychic ground: dark, fertile, decomposing, where what has outlived itself must rot before something new can emerge. Midlife brings the ego to the limits of its defended autonomy and asks for a descent into the chthonic depths - for women, into a radical receptivity beyond accommodation and approval; for men, into the body as vessel for what cannot be controlled. If we can bear the disorientation and fragmentation of this descent, something miraculous may occur. Not a better self, but the soul herself begins to emerge. And she is beautiful. The maternal, once feared as engulfing, is revealed as the ground in which life was waiting all along. The descent becomes the ascent: not away from the mother, but through her, through the Great Round of decay, gestation, emergence and return. We do not become ourselves by remaining untouched. We become ourselves by becoming soiled.  

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Mothering in the Round: Gaia, Demeter, Persephone, Hecate
by Elizabeth Éowyn Nelson, PhD

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter teases readers with intimations about the complex relationship between the goddess Demeter and her nameless daughter, the kore. Over the course of the narrative, the naïve and untested kore becomes the dread queen of the underworld Persephone. This lecture begins with a feminist reading of the daughter’s journey from maiden to queen, then shifts perspective to consider how loss, grief, and rage ultimately grant the mother fresh access to her own considerable power. The lecture explores two other enigmatic goddesses featured in the Hymn, Gaia and Hekate. Though mentioned only briefly, they frame the story at its beginning and at the end and are instrumental in the transformation of both Demeter and Persephone. All four goddesses offer differentiated images of archetypal mothering. Taken together, they portray mothering in the round.  

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The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind
by Professor Giovanna Colombetti

In this discussion about the he Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last thirty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science -- the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science.