The Devouring Mother: Facing Archetypal Darkness
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every archetype has a dual aspect: light and dark, and ‘mother’ as devouring and destructive is the dark side of this ever-present, over-arching archetype. The mother’s life-giving, bright aspect is counterbalanced by her engulfing, attacking aspect. The devouring mother is present across cultures in myth, fairy tale, religion, and literature, and most of us have at least had glimpses of her in our experiences as children or later, as parents.
In this episode Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart explore Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother and his and Jung’s concept of the unconscious as devouring mother.
Drawing on myths of the Aztec goddess Tlaltecuhtli, the Hindu goddess Kali, the tale of Snow White, and the film Black Swan, we examine the archetypal image of the mother who nourishes and devours, protects and possesses.
We also look at how the devouring mother shows up in ourselves and in our own parents. This dynamic can present as enmeshment, helicopter parenting, fear-based control, or an inability to allow our children to separate and become fully themselves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | To pick up on Neumann again, now he says that the achievement of consciousness is a great work. |
| 0:08.2 | We're initially born in this state of oceanic oneness. That's this kind of oryborg bliss. |
| 0:14.1 | There is no consciousness. We're just happy babies and all of our needs are met. |
| 0:18.8 | And then over time, we have to kind of fight our way out of that. |
| 0:23.0 | It's associated with the hero. |
| 0:25.5 | The mother goddess in the form of a demon or monster has to be slain. |
| 0:30.3 | And that is symbolically an image of consciousness overcoming the kind of constant pull toward becoming unconscious. |
| 0:43.1 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:45.9 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:51.3 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings |
| 0:55.6 | a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 1:01.5 | I'm Lisa Marcheano and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 1:05.2 | I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 1:10.1 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod. |
| 1:25.6 | Well, we have covered the mother on this podcast several times before. |
| 1:30.3 | We've done an episode on the negative mother, and kind of recently we did an episode on the |
| 1:35.3 | deaf mother. And we wanted to take a slightly different look at mothers today by looking |
| 1:42.3 | at the devouring mother. This is a concept that I think is most |
| 1:48.5 | usefully framed very archetypally. And we are going to be helped along today by the work of |
| 1:56.9 | an early Jungian analyst named Eric Neumann. |
| 2:01.8 | Neumann wrote a real important tome called The Great Mother. |
| 2:07.3 | And he talks about the different kinds of archetypal images of mother, |
... |
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