Chapter 14 Erich Neumann’s Great Mother, André Green’s Dead Mother, and Ecopsychology

In: Collective Structures of Imagination in Jungian Interpretation
Author:
Lidar Shany
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Abstract

Based on Erich Neumann’s perception of the archetypal nature of human psychological development, which indicates the affinity between the collective and the individual, this paper suggests the creation of an ecopsychological cultural complex based on what we understand about an individual’s psychology.

The paper will synthesize Neumann’s writings about the Feminine and the Earth archetype and his theory about children’s psychological development with André Green’s notion of the dead mother complex. Doing so, this paper will suggest an ecopsychological perspective through which the development of consciousness in Western culture led to a bias toward the patriarchy and the masculine, which created a collective experience of alienation from nature and a deprivation of the feminine qualities of containment, nourishment, and relatedness. This paper will also suggest that Western culture’s alienation from nature is experienced as a deprivation of the love of Great Mother Earth and thus forms a cultural complex of the dead mother and its central pathology as a loss of meaning, which calls for ecopsychological healing.

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