Seminar #5 - The Other Mother

The Other Mother from Neil Gamain’s Coraline

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Seminar #5: The Other Mother

The devouring mother, the negative mother who instead of giving birth devours everything. But in this there is the germ of the positive: under certain conditions a new birth is being prepared. ~ Children’s Dreams, 1938-39 Seminar, C. G. Jung

A seminar member asked me to expand on Marion Woodman’s discussion of the archetype of the “Death Mother” a specific, deadending, annihilating Medusa-like aspect of the Great Mother archetype. Woodman is someone whose work I am aware of, and that I respect, but have never been called to dive deeply into. I turned to her work primarily when I encountered client’s with eating disorders – which is frankly a population that I often felt ineffectual with, even as I cared deeply about individuals who struggled with such issues - and I decided after the early phases of my private practice, that it was an issue that I as a generalist, was ill equipped to serve.  I began, for the most part, referring clients with those issues to specialists with more skills and expertise. I suppose I put Woodman away at that time, as I associated her - certainly not exclusively - with that population. So: I am generally familiar with her work, but not enough and should put her back on my reading list.   – But for those who would like additional reading expanding specifically on Woodman’s work and the Death Mother – you might want to look here.

“NEGATIVE” ASPECTS OF THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE

I thought I would use this session to expand upon the negative-aspect of the Mother archetype in general - and how we might find the such archetypes as Terrible Mother, the Devouring Mother as they emerge in our own lives, in object-relational psychoanalytic theory, in our personal relationships and in our consultation rooms.

And a brief note: although there is certainly a great deal about mothering that is culturally and biologically gendered, the Maternal Archetype is present in all acts of care taking and receiving care no matter who administers them. There are many many actual and surrogate “male mothers” raising children and treating clients in this wide world.Woodman also wrote extensively and lectured on the image of the Black Madonna, - as she emerges iconic portraits of dark-skinned Mary’s in Catholic churches through out the world, in dreams, in visions and as a cultural Mother figure who represents the fertility of the earth mother, as well as the wounded Mother, as the Madonna of Solitude and Sorrow, who receives, and transforms all of our most overwhelming grief and pain. 

I wrote about how maternal archetpyes emerge in our own parenting, and in larger generational and cultural parenting trends in an essay titled Mother Load. In it I explore Mary’s narrative as an example of a maternal arc  that many might judge as an example of “failed” parenting: The disavowed and rejected mother. The mother of a convicted criminal. The mother who will never be a grandmother. The mother of a homeless son. The mother of a man killed as an enemy of the state. The mother who mourns. The martyred, masochistic mother.

But the seemingly martyred grieving mother who can evoke our empathy, and/or our judgment can also have a negative/destructive impact on the world around her: In another dark aspect of the Mother archetype - the Greek goddess, Demeter turns the entire earth barren, closes up the wombs of all living creatures and leaves the fields void of harvest  as she grieves the loss of Persephone, her daughter (who is first both held captive and who then chooses to dwell in the underworld for half of the year beyond her mother’s reach) I know that my own experiences of bereavement greatly effected the amount of nurturance and energy that I could offer my children and my clients at its peak.

This gives us a glimpse of the long suffering archetype of the Mother of all Sorrows – but there are instinctive human maternal impulses & instinctive experiences of being mothered that are darker still, and that generate powerful responses in us all throughout the course of our lives.

In Jungian thought: archetypes are merely instinctive energies – which can be useful or destructive depending on the circumstance that triggers them. For example: a rodent's freeze instinct is helpful if he is in a setting that camouflages him effectively – but in a very exposed environment the same instinct can put him in harms way. I recently ran over a chipmunk in the road who suddenly stopped running as I slowed down to let him pass, and right as my wheel slowly approached. If he hadn’t misapplied the freeze instinct, and had just kept running at his established rate of speed - we would have both been spared the suffering of his death. Instinctive archetypal responses can guide us toward survival and fulfillment of our life’s purpose and connect us to our deep and grounding history - or they can be misapplied, misattuned, or archaic – an obsolete instinctive relic from an earlier stage of our human evolution. For Jung, we must use our consciousness to observe, monitor, be informed by and differentiate from our instinctive lives. When we find ourselves controlled by an instinct that is not useful or worse, is destructive, Jung would say we are entangled in a “complex” or “possessed by the archetype”

Here Jung tells of a man whose chance of fulfillment was derailed by his mother complex, trapped by the archetype of the Devouring Mother- as revealed through his dreams:

the dreamer, a man, is in a simple house with an old peasant woman. He tells this woman of an intended long journey to Leipzig. Then a monstrous crab appears on the horizon and it clutches at him with its claws. The dreamer has a little wishing rod in his hand with which he touches the monsters head and it falls down dead. . ~ Children’s Dreams, 1938-39 Seminar, C. G. Jung

Jung points out that the dream starts out with some apparently nurturing maternal energy in a simple house with an older “simple” peasant woman. The dreamer reported that he is comfortable enough, even excited, to tell the kind old woman about the big journey he is planning. But…

The dreamer has scarcely finished telling his intention of going to Leipzig when a giant animal with claws, a lizard crab, a monster appears, that threatens to seize him in her claws. That is also the mother, but the other side, the death bringing mother. She has the two aspects: under the one aspect she gives the child life, cares for it, brings it up; but when the child wants to leave her, to go out into the world, she cannot let him go. It breaks her heart. He must first bury his mother. This he cannot do. He cannot murder his mother so she swallows him. She is like Mother Earth, out of which we come, and into which we return again. She is life, but she is also death… The devouring mother appears in this dream as a monster… He cannot get past the mother. ~ Children’s Dreams, 1938-39 Seminar, C. G. Jung

So this is an important point: when we talk about Mother as an archetype we are not talking necessarily talking about the actual personality of the mother. We are talking about a cluster of evolutionary, instinctive, and cultural expectations, fantasies, desires, fears that we as human animals have about Mothers generally. When we have a good sticky complex of any kind there is likely some degree of overlap and confusion between reality and instinct, but this can be to greater or lesser degrees. So: this dream isn’t about the dreamer’s mother. It is about the client’s Mother complex:

This man had too ambitious a plan. He wished to go too far. In reality he could not break away from the homesick longing for the past. That was his ruin. . ~ Children’s Dreams, 1938-39 Seminar, C. G. Jung (emphasis mine)

His Mother-complex manifests as a regressive impulse to remain a simple child in a simple home. Perhaps his actual mother undermines his leaving, or perhaps she pushes him to go when he is unready, or perhaps it is his own anxieties and constitution that sabotages him. Or perhaps a combination of all of these things. It is called a complex for a reason!

Certainly people who have survived parental abuse, whose parents were flooded by destructive/abusive parental instincts and who engaged in abusive behavior are contending with healing real trauma, but they must also contend with the lingering complex: the inherent archetypal yearning for the Good Mother, as well as the instinctive archetypal terror of encountering the Terrible Mother.

But it is also important to remember that the idea of a complex doesn’t require actual parental failure. Jung suggests that these instinctive yearning, fears, expectations are strong, sticky and compelling enough in and of themselves, that they can still capture us, fill us with conflict and confound us, like a chipmunk on a roadway, no matter how ideal our parental provision may have been.

And it is important to remember that the Terrible Devouring Mother is utterly inseparable from the All Nurturing Mother – and that our complexes around the Terrible Mother instincts can produce creative and positive outcomes just as the All Nurturing Mother can produce “negative” effects.

The goddess Kali in her great and terrible aspects is a good example of this. She is simultaneously the great destroyer and the kindest and most loving of the Hindu pantheon. In Kali’s “hideous aspect” she stands covered in blood, a string of skulls around her neck, in a sea of blood. This “life flood”, this “sacrificial sap” is then transformed by her so that :

“she may, in her gracious manifestation as the World Mother bestow existence upon new living forms in a process of unceasing generation that as world nurse she may suckle them on her breasts and give them the good that is “is full of nourishment” ~ The Great Mother, Erich Neuman

The Good Mother and the Terrible Mother are one entity and it is impossible to separate them expect through psychological splitting.

Young children often experience the Loving Mother as an entirely different entity than the Wrathful Mother. But over time, children, if their environment and constitution permits, begin to integrate these entities into one human being with flaws, limitations, strengths and gifts. As my son once said to me when he was 5 or 6: “You are not a bad mommy, and you are not a good mommy. You, are a mixed-up mommy!”

And such archetypal energies are mixed-together too. This is part of why it is so hard to separate from parents who are harmful or abusive: we cannot kill off the Terrible Mother, without killing off our yearning for the Good one.

The point is not to repress or favor one aspect over the other, the trick is to try to be as conscious of how these primal instincts and desires and fears drive our behavior as possible: So, now that I have teenagers testing out their autonomy and power in my home - I find that I sometimes the Terrible Mother is activated, and hopefully channeled by me, to help my kids learn to harness their own destructive impulsive instinctive energies:

This is me, managing my maternal rage with a thirteen and fourteen year old who were testing out their powers of defiance and autonomy - simultaneously possessed and consciously managing my Terrible Mother/Kali the Destroyer instincts: (albeit with a string of deactivated cellphones around my neck instead of skulls) : “NEVER FORGET I CAN KILL YOUR CELL-PHONE IN A SPLIT SECOND. I CAN CALL ON VERIZON AND ERASE YOUR DATA PLAN OFF THE FACE OF THIS EARTH.”

I gave this smart phone life, and I have the power to take it away.

These Terrible Mother energies can be activated and then used in service of generativity – and self-and other preservation - as psychotherapists when we need to assert firm boundaries to protect our clients and ourselves in the face of treatment destructive behavior. When seeing explosive clients for example, or clients with a history of violence there are times we as caretakers may need to summon Kali-like energies to keep the psychotherapy safe and healthy for all. Ie: “We use our words here. You are not allowed to threaten anyone in this space and I will call 911, your case will be closed, and your parole officer contacted if you cannot respect that rule”

There are certainly subtler parameters and boundaries which also require conscious use of such “Terrible Mother” energies. It is important for psychotherapists to remember that is sometimes necessary/better to “kill off” a psychotherapeutic course of treatment, than to allow it to be pulled into spaces that become toxic or dangerous to the client or to the practitioner. Sometimes, in order to “do no harm” to the client and ourselves we must “harm” the psychotherapy itself. And, like Kali, even these “hideous” energies can serve compassionate ends – as it a kind of cruelty to allow others to become too engulfed by their own destructiveness.

The murderous aspect of the Great Mother is sometimes the only thing that can meet, match, and contain our own murderous/destructive impulses, and when we are on the receiving end of the transaction - Kali can deliver important warnings about the limitations of our powers and remind us that there is  limited  tolerance for our destructive shenanigans.

SPLITTING THE MATERNAL ARCHETYPE

Object relations theory, and its extrapolaters such as Winnicott and Melanie Klein – all write about these archetypes in their own language - the “good enough mother” in Winncott’s terms is the optimal mother who is both good and bad and enables her children to see her as “mixed up” in this way. The "too good mother" in Winnicott’s view is as destructive as the "too bad mother" – Good Enough/Mixed up is the mother which nourishes her child enough, but is also limited in enough in what she can or is willing to provide that it allows the child to reject and separate from her.

In Klien’s discussion of our fantasy relationship to the archetypal (not the personal) mother she refers to the archetype as the Good Breast and Bad Breast to distinguish these instinctive templates about what we hope and fear about our experience of being mothered from the actual personality of the mother itself. She sees the child’s process of integrating these Good/Bad images into one integrated object as an ongoing developmental process which must be worked through over and over with each new object of our desire and over the course of our lives. 

The ego endeavors to keep the good apart from the bad, and the real from the phantastic objects. The result is a conception of extremely bad and extremely perfect objects, that is to say it's loved objects, are in many ways, intensely moral and exacting. ~ Melanie Klein, A Contribution to the Psychogenisis of Manic-Depressive States

Klien uses the word “phantasy” to distinguish between instinctively generated images and expectations from acts of conscious imagination and fantasy, and “object” relations theory talks about “Objects” - ie: Mother objects, etc, in much the way Jung talks about archetype – as a instinctive internal template that shapes our expectation, desires and experiences. The maternal “object” doesn’t refer to the actual personality of the caretaker (although it can certainly overlap). Again – people with histories of abusive parenting have BOTH a real destructive mother to contend with AND the instinctively generated images (objects, archetypes, phantasies) that we all have about a Good Eternally Flowing Breast and a Bad, Poisonous, or Persecutory Breast.

Those without abuse histories, but with “mixed up” good-enough parenting in their histories may still have to wrestle with these instinctive fantasies over the course of their lives to greater lesser degrees. This is in no way indicating that abuse is merely fantasy. Instinctive fantasy and reality can overlap or diverge with both adaptive and maladaptive effects. As an example: there are many people in abusive relationships who stay because they are transfixed by the phantasy of the Good Mother:

In some patients who had turned away from their mother in dislike or hate, or used some other mechanism to get away from her, I have found that there existed in their minds nevertheless a beautiful picture of the mother, but one which was felt be a picture of her only, not her real self. The real object was felt to be unattractive - really an injured incurable, and therefore dreaded person. The beautiful picture had been dissociated from the real object but had never been given up and played a great part in the specific ways of their sublimations.              ~ Melanie Klein

In Neil Gamain’s, Coraline, The Other Mother,  the book’s villain eventually revealed as a witch (negative mother archetype) who looks exactly like Coraline’s actual mother – except for her dead, button eyes lives. The Other Mother lives in a mirror world, and appears to be attentive  and gratifying in all the ways that Coralines’ mother is not. And in the end, we see that her Goodness is a lure – she is a Devouring Mother, a persecutory Bad Breast who entraps and feeds off of the souls of children.

By watching the cycle of our perception of the Good/Bad breast, and observing as our experiences of caring and being cared for moves from Beneficent Mother to Mother of all Sorrows, to Hideous Mother – allows us, over the course of time, to perceive all these phases as aspects as one entity.  Just as if we were to watch only one months cycle of the moon, we might at first imagine that the New Moon the waxing moon, the waning moon, and the Full Moon are all different moons in the sky.

But with deeper and repetitive observation we discern  they are all one object in different phases. In a similar way, the child, (and adults too), may, by observing the cycle over over through many repetitions may come to realize  that the Good Mother, the Self-Sacrificing Mother, the Frustrating Mother, the Persecutory Mother the Devouring Mother (as they are manifest in their own psyche as well in the personalities of others) are all one integrated “object” - allowing the child to move toward self- and other- compassionate,  “whole object” relationships instead of agitated, powerless, fearful, “part object” relationships.

To weld the phases of the light and dark mother together as one brings us to wholeness, to a rounded view, - like the moon. When our psyche splits these aspects apart it means that some aspect of the Mother imago is repressed, denied, or forgotten about, and will go to work in our unconscious – without our conscious awareness, consent or participation.

When we sit in care-taking relationship with clients who are struggling to integrate these split archetypes, the therapist will experience themselves repetitively being taken in, and spit back out, and taken in and spit back out – as they are alternately being experienced as being “All Good Breast” or the “All Bad Breast.” The hope is that this very challenging, sometimes draining repetitive cycle is how we come to synthesize these images in to a greater perception of wholeness.

Here, Jungian M. Esther Harding discusses how the Too Good Mother, Too Gratifying Mother can succumb to the power of the weak King Baby with destructive outcomes:

The weak know no mercy. Their weakness makes demands on the strength of the strong until the last gasp, and the strong cannot turn and throw them off. Their very strength hands them over, bound to those dependent upon them.

But a mother who allows her children to enchain her too long will find the position  reversed - she becomes the weak one. When they grow up and cease to need her she cannot let them go. If she has sacrificed herself to them until there is no self left except the part that lives in them, she will instinctively cling to them, and they will be compelled in self-defense to throw off her compulsively grasping fingers. ~ The Way of All Women, M. Esther Harding

Contrast Klein’s passage - the destructive external mother and its relationship to the phanstasy of the Good Mother, and Harding’s description of the Too Perfect Mother transforming into a Devouring archetype. Incidents of external, unlovable unadmirable mothering can instill in the child with a compensatory idealized perfectionistic picture of a perfected mother that haunts and drives them. Experiences of an external over-gratifying mother may create a sense of oppression and entrap children in states of cloying dependency. A complex indeed.

There is no way to “only win” or “do it right” as a mother, a maternal caretaker, or a caretaking, clinical transferential stand-in – in part because “Mother” is a collective, archetypal role and such roles function in ways  that always have light and dark, generative and destructive implications.  There is no way split the archetype, except to banish part of its function from our awareness.

We can only be “whole” mothers, (or maternal stand-ins as psychotherapists), simultaneously supportive and sabotaging, loving and engulfing, encouraging and abandoning. Sorrowful and clingy, autonomous and rejecting. And coming to consciousness over and over again about what aspect of instinct has momentary hold of us. Our relationships to our actual mothers and maternal stand-ins will always demonstrate these complexities too.

In Harding’s view the task is a challenging one that requires constant self-and other examination and re-calibration: To love those in our care for who they are, while forsaking the wish for the labor of caretaking to be particularly or consistently emotionally gratifying – to be sure that we have regular resources for gratification outside of the processes of care taking,  to pursue wholeness in mothering, rather than goodness in mothering – this is differentiating from possession by one face of the archetype, to momentarily transcend our instinctive perceptions and responses:

To be able to act in this way requires a high degree of discipline. This is redeemed maternal love and not just the instinctive maternal feeling of the animal. ~ The Way of All Women, M. Esther Harding

None of us want to be destructive to those in our care – but there are times when the Devouring Mother is inescapable: We can all be possessed by the Sow Who Eats her Own Piglets.My cancer diagnosis for example, occurred right at a time when my children were moving into adolescence, and needing to separate from me, and to find their own center far beyond being concerned by pleasing me. My level of need and dependency intensified and threatened to devour my children’s autonomy just as they were beginning to push off. A similar dynamic unfolded with my clients – whose own dependency, or separating processes were disrupted by my illness. Some clients felt great internal reparative pressure to simultaneously  “be easy on me” and also to book extra and unnecessary appointments to sustain me financially. Other client’s experienced me as withholding, persecutory and rejecting, or struggled with shame that their excruciating hunger would not be satiated by my limited capacity to schedule brief check ins by phone, email or skype. Some client’s whose needs were greater than I would be able to meet, felt themselves to be “killed off” by me when I insisted that they pursue referrals and other psychotherapists who could provide them with care and consistency that I could not.

Through the mutual dependence of mother and child, the struggle for freedom will reveal the “other side,” one might say the “underside” of the maternal attitude, aptly called by Jung “the devouring mother” - ~ The Way of All Women, M. Esther Harding

And of course my own terror of the Devouring Mother erupted in my dreams, nightmares, and in synchronicities: I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of  maternal hunger  as I had cared for my mother’s consuming neediness through her her illness and dying – and it took all the strength I had to try to restrain those consuming impulses in myself.  And I failed at this many times. Being with my children was my deepest comfort and anchor to living -just as they needed to get away from being mothered. So: of course, in the midst of this, my daughter’s two supposedly female hamsters, turned out not to be both female – and produced a pink, blind squiggly litter – four hamster babies in danger of being consumed by their parents right in my daughter’s bedroom. My daughter and I engaged in ridiculous and heroically successful efforts to make sure the Devouring Hamster Mother did not consume her own young in our home. 

This Terrible Mother is the hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses ~ The Great Mother, Erich Neuman

And now, with some increasing distance: I see that my falling into a state of inescapable need also had positive outcomes that I could never have anticipated. My children ultimately became more confident in their empowerment, more competent – and the same thing happened with several clients: By responding to my state of sucking need, the Devouring Mother activated and motivated many clients  separation process and allowed me to move out of an unconscious Too Good mother role. The Terrible Mother initiated and motivated a separation process. Sometimes it is only the hopelessness of the “bad dried up breast” that allows us to push away and move past archaic dependencies

The mother’s release from the identification with the good-bad maternal instinct (aka archetypes) can take place only through psychological differentiation of herself from her children, by which she grants them the right to live their own life and die their own deaths, to suffer as well as to enjoy.

The attitude which says, “I want to make you happy, to make life easy for you, I want to guard you from every breath of hardship and adversity” is terrible. It seems so kind yet it is really so cruel. It is nothing less than an attempt to play God to the child. ~ The Way of All Women, M. Esther Harding

The Devouring Mother is most harmful when she is pressed into unconsciousness, denied and split off: There are healing properties of acknowledging the Destructive Mother, and therefore consciously differentiating from the Devouring Goddess:

Winnicott writes about all the ways that mothers/caretakers can consciously and healthfully hate their children, (some of which also speaks to the hateful counter-transferences that therapists have as part of their healthy attachment to their clients)

I suggest that the mother hates the baby before the baby hates the mother, and before the baby can know his mother hates him... We know about a mother’s love and we appreciate its reality and power. Let me give some of the reasons a mother hates her baby:

The baby is not her own (mental) conception.

The baby is not the one of childhood play

The baby is not magically produced.

The baby is a danger to her body in pregnancy and birth.

The baby is an interference with her private life.

To a greater or lesser extent a mother feels that her own mother demands a baby, so that the baby is produced to placate her mother.

The baby hurts her nipples even by suckling which is at first a chewing activity.

He (the baby) is ruthless, treats her as scum, as an unpaid servant, a slave.

She has to love him, excretions and all.

He tries to hurt her, periodically bites her, all in love.

He shows disillusionment about her.

His excited love is cupboard love, so that having got what he wanted he throws her away like an orange peel.

The baby must first dominate….

He is suspicious, refuses her good food, makes her doubt herself and then eats well with his aunt.

After an awful morning with him she goes out, and he smiles at a stranger who says: “Isn’t he sweet?”

If she fails him at the start she know he will pay her out forever…

~Hate in the Countertransference, D.W. Winnicot

Maternal hate is both completely natural instinctive (archetypal) response and simultaneously intolerable for the child to be made too aware of in the wrong way. Instinctive maternal hate, or the archetype of the Terrible Mother - depending on your model - holds up a mirror, forces us to encounter and come to terms our own destructiveness as our Mother’s Children.

This is why she is so terrible, so intolerable. We are terrified of our Mother’s maternal hate, and terrified of our own maternal hate as mothers ourselves, just as we are terrified by our instinctive hatred for our mothers. Allah is said to always to hear the prayer of of mother who prays for the destruction of her own children. A mother’s curse is considered impenetrable by most forms of folk magic.

A mother has to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it she cannot express it to him for fear of what she might do, she cannot hate appropriately when hurt by her child, she must fall back on masochism… The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may or may not come at a later date.

~Hate in the Countertransference, D.W. Winnicot

The title of Winnicott’s article reminds us that this maternal hate, the face of the Terrible Mother is an inherent countertransferential experience as well, and one we must come to terms with in ourselves as practicioners in order to encounter our whole selves, and withstand our client’s wholeness.Here is the good news: The Devouring Mother aspect - when we are not possessed by it, but monitoring its energies consciously -can activate and initiate our offspring and our clients into the processes of developmental differentiation – as they seek to preserve themselves from us. Think of the cruelty of a mother-bird casting fledgling out of her nest- some of who will die broken on the earth at the base of the tree, and who will fertilize new life:The cycles of the moon, are faces of one moon. The cycles of Birth, Feeding, Hunt, Destruction, Death, Decay, Rot, Fertilization and Rebirth, and Fertility are all the faces of the Mother archetype and instincts which we must contend with in all forms in our personal and professional lives.