03/09/2026
Erich Neumann's book, The Great Mother (1955) was a major companion through the years of my thesis research & writing.
Erich Neumann was a Jungian Analyst and a student then peer of C.G. Jung. He analyzed tens of thousands of years of human culture from Paleolithic artifacts (like the Venus of Willendorf) to global religious symbols to analyze and write on The Great Mother Archetype.
For Erich Neumann, the Great Mother is part of the larger structure of the Archetypal Feminine, a primordial psychic reality that has expressed itself across cultures through myths, symbols, rituals, dreams, goddesses, and other forms of psychic life.
Neumann’s distinguishes two modes or “characters” of the Archetypal Feminine:
The Elementary Character and the Transformative Character. The Elementary Character is the aspect framed as containment-like.
Neumann calls her the “Great Round” and the “Great Container.” She holds, surrounds, protects, nourishes, preserves, and gives continuity to what exists within her. This is the maternal function through which life experiences: nourishment, warmth, protection, safety, belonging, containment.
But Neumann does not romanticize containment. The elementary character can also be ambivalent. The Great Container “tends to hold fast to everything that springs from it.” What holds can therefore also retain and restrict.
At its positive pole, containment provides the conditions necessary for life and development.
At its negative pole, containment can become engulfment: what has emerged from the "maternal matrix" is prevented from separating, differentiating, or becoming independent.
The second fundamental character is not primarily concerned with preserving life as it is, but with changing it.
Neumann calls this the transformative character of the Feminine, which we will explore in a different post next week.
