The Motif Of Falling: Falling And The Loss Of The Mother

Harry Guntrip dreamed “He was floating in dark space, attached by a long, ectoplasmic cord reaching from his navel to a shadowy, feminine figure. The cord became thinner and thinner and snapped, leaving him falling in space, in sheer panic”(Landis, 1981, p. 115). He associated the feminine figure of his dream with his mother and with his psychoanalyst, Winnicott, who had been dead a year and a half. It is my thesis that Guntrip's dream embodies a regular meaning of the typical dream of falling and a symbolic meaning of falling: loss of the mother.

To support this thesis I shall review studies which suggest that while falling, like any mental representation, can carry various meanings, there is among these several meanings the regular meaning of maternal loss. I shall also present evidence from dreams, symptoms, and patterns of associations of patients in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to show that falling represents maternal loss.

I shall examine more briefly three additional facets of the topic: the wishes and fears which generate the motif as well as the paradoxes posed by the motifs apparently antithetical meanings, the relationship between ideas of falling and ideas of other forms of descent, and the appearance in tropes and myths of the idea of falling. The assembled evidence, judged in light of Jones's (1916) observations that symbols carry a consistent meaning in dreams, symptoms, and the creations of culture, will, I believe, support my thesis.