This seminar explores the relationship between the mother complex, the mother archetype and the Self in individual development. We consider both archetypal and developmental perspectives to explore the effect of our experience of ‘Mother’, revisiting Neumann’s seminal insight that the personal mother functions as ‘locus of incarnation’ of the Self. When yearning for connection is thwarted, a negative archetypal constellation ensues; the symbolic realm is foreclosed. Exploring clinical material, we witness how the re-emergence of arrested longing may coincide with reawakened symbolic capacity. The regressive pull through the wounds of the personal mother complex proves purposive: facilitating a vital,restorative process of connection to the creative potentialities of the Self.

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Nan Parry is a Jungian Analyst and Training Supervisor with GAP. She read Modern and Medieval Languages at Jesus College, Cambridge, where she was awarded a Foundation Scholarship. She then worked as a journalist and editor before taking her MA in Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies at the University of Essex.  After completing her training with GAP, she set up her private practice in Central London, where she sees a mixture of private patients, trainees and supervisees. She has taught widely on the GAP Diploma Course, Foundation Course and as Honorary Lecturer on the Jungian MA at the University of Essex.

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Jung, C.G., Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of Thought, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle, introd. William McGuire, London: Routledge (1991)

Jung, C.G., Collected Works, Vol. 9i, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype (1938/1954) §148-§198

Neumann, E., The Child: Structureand Dynamics of the Nascent Personality, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: Routledge (2018)

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