Insatiability and “inextinguishable vitality” of the Great Mother Archetype. The mystery of the “bearing womb” as a symbol of creative universalism Cover Image

Insatiability and “inextinguishable vitality” of the Great Mother Archetype. The mystery of the “bearing womb” as a symbol of creative universalism
Insatiability and “inextinguishable vitality” of the Great Mother Archetype. The mystery of the “bearing womb” as a symbol of creative universalism

Author(s): Monika Jaworska-Witkowska
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Gender Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pomorskiej w Słupsku
Keywords: Jung;archetype;Great Mother; creativity;vitality;insatiable;transformation;duality;

Summary/Abstract: The text introduces cultural and social exemplifications of the Great Mother Archetype, which is in Jung’s conception the psychic principle of the mother, the principle of something acting like mother, as a creative matrix and a mystery or “bearing womb”. This interpretative perspective has served to distinguish a premise, according to which the mother’s archetype may serve as a universal symbol of creativity/creation, while being a rule beyond time and individual being. In its desire, vitality and unrestricted vehemence within the mother archetype is simultaneously one of the insatiable things, i. e. unsubordinated, with unlimited and infinite fertility, as the “eternal presence” which cannot be stopped within the cycle of transformation between destruction and resurrection. The text analyses different heuristic consequences of the initial premise, concentrated around ideas making more concrete problems of the Great Mother Archetype with the categories of: symbolic death and renaissance, the imagination completeness, the symbol of eternal matrix and visual forms of any “being born”, all that is fertilizing, potentially maternal and thus dual.

  • Issue Year: 2015
  • Issue No: 1/2
  • Page Range: 214-234
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: English