The Bad Mother: An Archetypal Approach by James Hillman
I.
What follows takes up again a well-worn theme: mother and child. The mother archetype, the child archetype-depth psychology founds itself, and founders, usually, on these rocks. That life and depth psychology begin with mother and child says that we are in the rhetoric of beginnings, of foundational questions.
That the theme is so well worn says it has become unconscious again, laid smoothly in a groove, a grave. We do believe we know pretty much about it; read the psychological literature from Freud and Jung through Wickes, Neumann, and Fordham to Berry: we all do believe we know what’s the matter· with mother.1
If we can find a new twist in this basic theme and if, in particular, the bad mother can be revisioned, then we may be revisioning the basis of psychology and even life itself. Finding that twist is what we are all about. We start with four assumptions.
First, there is an archetypal experience of bad mothering that badly needs to be understood as a psychological phenomenon in itself apart from norms about good and bad behaviors or acts of mothering. Even so-called good mothers experience themselves to be bad mothers.
Second, we can analyze this archetypal experience of bad bothering apart from empirical cases, phenomenological protocols, and sociological surveys.- l”here are–also-archetypal–structures in experience, and these may be scrutinized by an archetypal method.
Third, we assume there is an inner child, an archetypal child imago, affecting each of us and so affecting every mother andmothering act.
Fourth, we can distinguish between the archetypal contents of mother and child as contents in a tandem and the archetypal structure of the tandem as such.
Mother and child are not only each what they are, but they are as they are because they are locked together in a tandem which affects the nature of each.
We therefore need to look more closely at tandems if we want to understand any contents, such as mother and child, that are embraced by a tandem. These tandems-and I use this term for dyads, pairs, couplings, polarities, syzygies-whatever their contents, are affected by patterns of oppositional thinking such as dark/light, alive/ dead, order/ disorder, true/false, presence/ absence, vertical/horizontal.
Philosophers have elaborated further basic antinomies and have dissected oppositions into different sorts ( contradictions, contraries, complementaries, etc.).
Structuralists have located various kinds of oppositions in social practices and linguistic structures.
The mother-child bond, simply because the bond is a tandem, is subject to the influence of oppositional thinking, or “oppositionalism.”
This fact complicates whatever we say about our subject.
Even if oppositionalism is not the only way in which reflective thinking proceeds ( one can reflect in images, with feeling moods and by playing), nonetheless oppositionalism does affect the individual patterns and thinking about these patterns in any particular dual relationship between male and female, superior and inferior, young and old, and within the mother-child relation as well.
Later we shall attempt to free the tandem from oppositionalism, but for now it is important to recognize that human behavior is subject to the transhuman structuring of archetypal configurations such as the tandem.
By placing the tandem relation in the foreground, I have reversed the usual approach of psychology which generally considers the m0ther-and-child prior to every other rubric. I want to show, however, that it submits to a category beyond itself.
This ‘meta’ – physical approach to an empirical problem-the experience of bad m0thering-is a contribution of the archetypal viewpoint to psychology.
A meta- or superordinate factor appears also in the biological approach to the m0ther-child bond. It too imagines the tandem, called “bonding,” to be the determinant factor to which both infant and m0ther submit.
Baby songbirds stretch their necks upward and open their mouths to reveal the yellow signaling spot which, anticipated by the m0ther’s inborn release mechanism, releases the food in her beak into their throats.
Lactation in the human mother coterminous with the search for the nipple in the neonate is a further example of superordinate bonding-a coordinated pattern, delicate, complex, and of enormous durability, holding m0ther and child together in a single pattern of behavior which, following Jung, we may call an archetypal image of instinct.
Lactation is not a simple mechanism; m0ther and child are not unvaryingly in the service of that function. They each bring with them their individual idiosyncrasies. In the relation, as contents they affect the relation-of course. And psychology usually locates the psychic structures that modify bonding within the mother per se or the child per se and their idiosyncratic interaction.
I wish to add a dimension by locating the psychic structures which influence bonding within the phenomenology of tandemness.
My point is that at any moment of m0thering, or of ‘childing,’ archetypal twoness is at work, necessitating a rich phenomenology of ambivalence, bipolarity, tension which constellates oppositions of various kinds.
Here, in the tandem, and not merely in the m0ther or in the child or in their superordinate instinctual interaction, the major psychological problems of motherhood and childhood begin.
The oppositionalism influencing tandems may take several forms. I shall single out one for our consideration: the child is imagined to be good, the mother bad. ~James Hillman, The Bad Mother: An Archetypal Approach, Page 102-104
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