You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
How and with what meaning, the author asks, can the extremes of creativity and destructiveness co-exist and alternate in the individual psyche? In response to her question, which touches on one of the most controversial areas of depth psychology, she offers some thirteen pages of straightforward rendering of the great mother aspect of the mother archetype. For it is here, in the realm of the maternal opposites, that the key to the question resides—‘she who gives us life can also destroy us’. The dual mother theme, largely in keeping with Jung's 1918 essay, is sketched out in broad areas of the symbolic, the psycho-biological and the clinical and is detailed by a few contemporary examples. While conveying the reassurance of an often told story, the author makes several significant asides. For example, Jung's break with Freud is characterised both as a movement from an historical father to an ahistorical mother orientation and as Jung putting to death with one stroke Freud's primordial father thesis and Freud the father of psychoanalysis. Interestingly, Anna Freud is later mentioned as a puella type. In general, however, little is added to the great themes of contradiction and confrontation in the maternal opposites that is not already familiar to our readers who, I think, would wish a closer look—and with a broader awareness of work since 1918—at the dynamic connectives between archetype and experience, both clinical and cultural.