Mother complex

1. Etymology

Mother in Jungian usage spans the personal mother, the mother complex, and the Great Mother archetypeimage and experience of the maternal that is never only biography. Related: imago; puer aeternus; anima; participation mystique.

2. Plain summary

Mother here is not only the person who raised you. Jung maps a feeling-toned complex around the maternal image, fed by personal experience, other women, and collective assumptions—and behind that, an archetypal Great Mother with a double face: cherishing fertility and devouring fate.

In a son, a strong mother complex can tie heterosexuality to the mother (or scatter it as Don Juanism); worked with, it can yield differentiated Eros and friendship. In a daughter it can heighten or inhibit feminine instinct. The infant organizes early dependence around good and bad poles projected onto the caregiver. Related to senex/puer dynamics when mother-bound provisional life never ends.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common mother-related figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):

feeling-toned ideas of mother; personal mother + other women + collective assumptions; son: homosexuality / Don Juanism / impotence (father complex also); daughter: stimulation or inhibition of feminine instinct; positive transformations via anima relationship; Great Mother archetypal fullness; positive pole (solicitude, fertility, cherishing); negative pole (abyss, devouring, fate); splitting of maternal imago; projection of archetypal structure onto the personal mother; puer aeternus mother-dependence; complex charge; shadow devouring mother; god-image / Magna Mater; individuation as separation without murder of the bond.

3. Academic elucidation

4. Lexicon

Sharp (1991) — Mother complex

Mother complex. A group of feeling-toned ideas associated with the experience and image of mother. … informed first of all by experience of the personal mother, then by significant contact with other women and by collective assumptions. … Typical effects on the son are homosexuality and Don Juanism… In the daughter, the effect of the mother complex ranges from stimulation of the feminine instinct to its inhibition…

(Sharp, 1991, p. [provisional — unverified])

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986) — mother See (list 94); body under Great Mother (list 62–63):

Great Mother influences which a mother exerts… do not necessarily derive from the mother herself… qualities spring from the archetypal structure surrounding ‘mother’ and are projected onto her by the child positive pole… maternal solicitude… fertility… negative pole… abyss devouring… fate…

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

The concept of the Great Mother belongs to the field of comparative religion and embraces widely varying types of mother-goddess. The concept itself is of no immediate concern to psychology… The symbol is obviously a derivative of the mother archetype.

The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female… On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate the loving and the terrible mother.”

(Jung, 1938/1968, CW 9i, pp. 81–82, 158)

The effects of the mother-complex differ according to whether it appears in a son or a daughter. Typical effects on the son are homosexuality and Don Juanism, and sometimes also impotence… in Don Juanism, he unconsciously seeks his mother in every woman he meets.

(Jung, 1938/1968, CW 9i, p. 85, ¶162)

Only in the daughter is the mother-complex clear and uncomplicated. Here we have to do either with an overdevelopment of feminine instincts indirectly caused by the mother, or with a weakening of them to the point of complete extinction… in the daughter a mother-complex either unduly stimulates or else inhibits the feminine instinct…

(Jung, 1938/1968, CW 9i, pp. 85–86, ¶163)

See also: complex; archetype; imago; anima; puer aeternus; senex; projection; participation mystique; shadow; individuation; countertransference. (Queued — not yet linked: great mother, mother-complex alias.)

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). Psychological aspects of the mother archetype. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, pt. 1, pp. 75, 81–86, ¶148, 158, 162–163). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.