Journey through the Archetypes: The Mother
Cultivate the unique beauty & power of the Mother archetype for intimacy, creativity, warmth & sensuality.
Archetypes are a subtle psychological images that help us navigate & understand the often complex & nuanced reality. While they may not give us insight into individual peculiarities, archetypes serve as a useful, wider image that helps us understand the reality we live in.
Many women who follow and read my work over the years told me they enjoyed one of the recommendations in my libraries and references in my work, and that is the “Goddess in Everywoman” by Jean Shinoda Bolen. The book has been a classic for women’s Jungian psychoanalysis for many years. Inspired by that, I shall write an article on each archetype, widening it from the original framework that Bolen uses (focusing on Ancient Greek mythology) and so making it more universal. The focus in these articles will be the practical aspect of how a woman can cultivate the archetypes to improve various areas of her life. I will provide techniques and also case studies, examples from media and public life that will help you understand the archetype.
The first archetype we shall explore is the Mother. Alongside the Lover, the Mother is the most ancient, primordial archetype there is, and as such, it has deep resonance and influence upon us. Mother is our first home, we refer to our homeland, to our native language, to our soil, to our food as a Mother — these are all the foundations of our identity.
When we think of the Mother archetype, we often think of it simply in terms of mothering children, and assume that the Mother has no role beyond that one. However, that isn’t the Mother’s only domain. The Mother archetype can be cultivated to bring more enjoyment in personal life, more creativity, more intimacy and even success in the professional plane.
Another common idea is to separate the Mother archetype from romance, sexuality or eroticism, which again, simply reveals a shallow understanding of these. Sexual and erotic acts often mimic the “mothering” acts — fondling, touching, pinching, caressing, kissing, sucking, embracing, holding — , all of these besides creating pleasure and excitement which relate to the Lover archetype, also create a sense of comfort and intimacy, both of which relate to the Mother archetype.
In fact, cultivating the Mother archetype is crucial if a woman seeks to develop intimacy in her romantic relationships — man being aroused by a woman is one thing, but the key for a man to actually fall in love and develop a deeper bond with a woman is in having him feel emotionally safe. This doesn’t mean that he wants to be pampered or mothered (most virile men do not like this), but that he needs to be held and have his energy be firmly grounded. No matter how virile or strong, a man often feels very vulnerable in the domain of emotions and sexuality. He subconsciously (and correctly) feels that woman holds all the power in these, and that whether he is to live or be reduced to nothing, is up to her. In a way, he experiences his own primordial fear of the Mother, who, when he was a young boy, had all power over his life and he was simply a powerless baby at her mercy.
If a man comes to like a woman and as he develops feelings for her, she can begin to dominate his consciousness — he will dream of her, see her in other women, in films, he may begin masturbating fantasising about her, she will become both the angel and the demon, the absolute good and the absolute evil, in short, his entire reality. This may make him lash out and seek to punish, hurt or cause pain to the the woman for the pain and tension she creates inside of him. Or he may in fear, withdraw. For these reasons, when a woman feels that a man she is with is excited or moved, it is important for her to know how to navigate the situation by containing him, rooting him and cooling him down. When this happens, his own energy can begin to move up, touching his heart, resulting in what we consider intimacy and love.
The initiatrix or the sacred prostitute we sometimes find in fiction and mythology, the one who initiates a young man into his virile manhood (the well-known scene of a father taking his 16 year old son to the prostitute) is simply a combination of the Lover and the Mother archetypes. One excites and inspires like the muse while the other holds and nurtures a new person that is being “born” from the interaction — the young man dies as a child and is reborn as a man by learning how to relate to a woman’s sexuality, not fearing it or demonising it. Our modern society has no need for such institutions anymore, which means that the archetypal dynamic shifts into the personal. Now, each woman can explore herself as this archetype, if she wishes to, without the potentially abusive institutions and in the way it feels safe for her.
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