Carl Jung on the Great Mother
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
Carl Jung’s Letter to “N” on the Human Psyche and the Great Mother:
Dear N.,
I was very pleased to hear that you now have house and land of your own.
This is important for the chthonic powers.
I hope you will find time to commit your plant counterparts to the earth and tend their growth, tor the earth always wants children–houses, trees, flower–to grow out of her and celebrate the marriage of the human psyche with the Great Mother, the best counter-magic against rootless extraversion!
With best regards to you and your dear husband,
Always your faithful C.G. Jung [Letter dated August 10, 1956]
Carl Jung on his Mother
She had a hearty animal warmth, cooked wonderfully, and was most companionable and pleasant.
She was very stout, and a ready listener.
She also liked to talk, and her chatter was like the gay plashing of a fountain.
She had a decided literary gift, as well as taste and depth.
But this quality never properly emerged; it remained hidden beneath the semblance of a kindly, fat old woman, extremely hospitable, and possessor of a great sense of humor.
She held all the conventional opinions a person was obliged to have, but then her unconscious personality would suddenly put in an appearance.
That personality was unexpectedly powerful: a somber, imposing figure possessed of unassailable authority-and no bones about it.
I was sure that she consisted of two personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny.
This other emerged only now and then, but each time it was unexpected and frightening.
She would then speak as if talking to herself, but what she said was aimed at me and usually struck to the core of my being, so that I was stunned into silence. Carl Jung, Jung: A Biography, Page 18
By day she (Jung’s) was a loving mother, but at night she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who is at the same time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear’s cave. Ancient and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature. Carl Jung, Jung: A Biography, Page 51
Carl Jung hypnotizes his mother
Another instance of the same thing was C.G.’s mother.
She remarked to him that hypnosis was a lot of nonsense and he replied, ‘Oh no, I’ll show you.’
He told her to hold up her arm, and then said, ‘Now you can’t put it down.’
She said, ‘Oh yes I can.’ ‘Well, put it down then,’ said C.G.
‘No,’ shevanswered, ‘I’m not hypnotised but I don’t want to put it down.’
Mrs. Jung and C.G.’s sister were there and they laughed.
Then he lifted his mother’s leg and held it horizontally, and there she sat with her arm up and her leg
stuck out.
She couldn’t move until he told her to do so, and yet she insisted that she was not hypnotised.
~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Pages 97-98
Erich Neumann: Yet in its struggle against this Mother Goddess
Devaluation of the Earth, hostility towards the Earth, fear of the Earth: these are all from the psychological point of view the expression of a weak patriarchal consciousness that knows no other way to help itself than to withdraw violently from the fascinating and overwhelming domain of the Earthly.
For we know that the archetypal projection of the Masculine experiences, not without justice, the Earth as the unconscious-making, instinct-entangling, and therefore dangerous Feminine.
At the same time the projection of the masculine anima is mingled with the living image of the Earth archetype in the unconscious of man; and the more one-sidedly masculine man’s conscious mind is the more primitive, unreliable, and therefore dangerous his anima will be.
However, the Earth archetype, in compensation to the divinity of the archetype of Heaven and the Father, that determined the consciousness of medieval man, is fused together with the archaic image of the Mother Goddess.
Yet in its struggle against this Mother Goddess, the conscious mind, in its historical development, has had great difficulty in asserting itself so as to reach its – patriarchal – independence.
The insecurity of this conscious mind-and we have profound experience of how insecure the position of the conscious mind still is in modern man-is always bound up with fear of the unconscious, and no well-meaning theory “against fear” will be able to rid the world of this deeply rooted anxiety, which at different times has been projected on different objects.
Whether this anxiety expresses itself in a religious form as the medieval fear of demons or witches, or politically as the modern fear of war with the State beyond the Iron Curtain, in every case we are dealing with a projection, though at the same time the anxiety is justified.
In reality, our small ego-consciousness is justifiably afraid of the superior power of the collective forces, both without and within.
In the history of the development of the conscious mind, for reasons which we cannot pursue here, the archetype of the Masculine Heaven is connected positively with the conscious mind, and the collective powers that threaten and devour the conscious mind both from without and within, are regarded as Feminine.
A negative evaluation of the Earth archetype is therefore necessary and inevitable for a masculine, patriarchal conscious mind that is still weak.
But this validity only applies in relation to a specific type of conscious mind; it alters as the integration of the human personality advances, and the conscious mind is strengthened and extended.
A one-sided conscious mind, such as prevailed in the medieval patriarchal order, is certainly radical, even fanatical, but in a psychological sense it is by no means strong.
As a result of the one-sidedness of the conscious mind, the human personality becomes involved in an equally one-sided opposition to its own unconscious, so that actually a split occurs.
Even if, for example, the Masculine principle identifies itself with the world of Heaven, and projects the evil world of Earth outwards on the alien Feminine principle, both worlds are still parts of the personality, and the repressing masculine spiritual world of Heaven and of the values of the conscious mind is continually undermined and threatened by the repressed but constantly attacking opposite side.
That is why the religious fanaticism of the representatives of the patriarchal World of Heaven reached its climax in the Inquisition and the witch trials, at the very moment when the influence of the archetype of Heaven, which had ruled the Middle Ages and the previous period, began to wane, and the opposite image of the Feminine Earth archetype began to emerge. ― Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, Page, 171-173
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