Negative Mother Complex: When Our Painful Childhood Owns Us
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2019
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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As the mother is the generator of life and usual primary attachment figure, the mother complex is universal. As the image of a “personified affect” fueled by an archetypal core, the mother complex is especially powerful. In its negative aspect, it may arise from a mother who was experienced as uncaring, attacking, possessive, withholding, absent, or wounded. It is likely to show up in relationships with others and in the relationship with oneself. Fairy tales like The Raven and Six Swans teach us that healing a negative mother complex takes time and perseverance—and that we may be aided by an animus prince or an anima princess, images of the autonomous unconscious. By responding to the turmoil of the mother complex one can embrace the task of finding the mother within.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, |
| 0:07.0 | Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation |
| 0:12.0 | that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 0:22.5 | I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 0:27.5 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. |
| 0:37.0 | We wanted to tackle a difficult subject today. We wanted to tackle a difficult subject today. |
| 0:40.3 | We wanted to discuss healing from a negative mother complex. |
| 0:45.3 | What do we even mean when we talk about a mother complex in general |
| 0:50.3 | and specifically a negative mother complex? |
| 0:55.1 | Well, one of the things that comes up for me is that I think the mother complex is, |
| 1:00.6 | if you'll pardon the pun, the mother of all complexes, because everybody has had a mother |
| 1:07.1 | one way or another. |
| 1:09.2 | That is such a huge and central, biologically oriented as well as |
| 1:15.5 | psychologically oriented relationship. And mothers still have, for the most part, the primary |
| 1:21.7 | caretaking role. So the mother complex is really huge, and we all have one. |
| 1:28.2 | Right. |
| 1:28.8 | And when we talk about a complex in Jungian terms, |
| 1:33.3 | we're talking about a sort of a network of associations and memories and feelings |
| 1:39.9 | that accrete around an archetypal core. |
| 1:43.4 | And in this case, obviously the archetype would be the archetype of the mother. |
| 1:49.1 | And every archetype has a positive pole and a negative pole. |
... |
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