Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissism: Jung’s Mother Archetype Absent
- 00:10 Halloween is coming and so inevitably naturally and normally we are going to discuss KL Gustav Jung the German or Swiss psychiatrist who fell in love and then out of love with Freud. One of the main contributions of Yume to the philosophical aspects of psychology
- 00:34 to meta psychology is the idea of archetypes and one of the most famous archetypes is the mother archetype. Now anyone who has been watching my videos for long and has survived knows that I am obsessed with mothers, especially the good kind, dead mothers.
- 00:57 So today I want to comment a bit on Yung’s mother archetype. In Yungian psychology, the mother archetype is usually associated with nurturing, with love, with empathy, with compassion, and with protection. In other words, the mother archetype in Yungian psychology
- 01:19 supposedly is all good. Jung said that we we can find mother archetypes in myths, mythology, in stories, in religious traditions. And he said that the mother archetype is the number one archetype of the feminine principle. It represents fertility, creativity,
- 01:41 abundance, and growth. So most people, self-styled experts and even scholars believe that Jung’s mother archetype is the ideal mother, what Winnott much later um what Winnott would call the good enough mother. But Jung saw the mother archetype in a
- 02:06 much more complex complex way. His view of the mother archetype and his view of mothers in general was much more nuanced. I wouldn’t say ambivalent. There was no lovehate relationship there. The way, for example, Freud had a lovehate relationship with father
- 02:23 figures, but it was nuanced. It was subtle. Yong’s intellect was formidable. He saw the mother archetype as an important element, an important aspect of the process of individuation on the road to self-realization, self-actualization, the process of becoming
- 02:49 and and being rendered whole, developing wholeness and personhood. The mother archetype is critical. It represents not only the proverbial mother out there or the biological mother or a mother figure or whatever. The mother archetype represents the individual’s own self-mothering,
- 03:14 self- nurturing, self-paring, the inner nurturing and caring qualities. And of course this goes hand in hand with the influence of the real mother and of other maternal figures. But sooner or later the individual develops what you may well call an
- 03:35 internal mother. Now we must distinguish this internal archetypal mother from the mother introject. The mother introject is an internal object that represents the real mother and it’s the voice of the real mother which stays with us with us for life. The internalized
- 03:55 maternal archetype is the qualities of motherhood that each one of us absorbs, incorporates and then leverages in an attempt to be self-mothering, self- nurturing, self-compassionate, our own best friends. In other words, what Jung is saying is that archetypal
- 04:19 motherhood or the archetypal mother, she is what we call self-love. This has vast implications. What Yuki is what Jung is trying to imply is that all self love is maternal
- 04:39 has maternal elements. This is very interesting because in my own work this process goes haywire in narcissism. In pathological narcissism this process goes haywire and the narcissist is capable of selflove only through an external maternal figure.
- 05:04 So let’s clarify it once more. Jung says you’re capable of self- loveve through an internalized maternal archetype through your internal mother. Whereas the narcissist is capable of self- loveve or at least self agrandisement is capable of self-reference and ex and regulation
- 05:26 only through a real external mother
- 05:32 figure not through the maternal archetype because the narcissist has not internalized a good mother. The narcissist’s mother was abusive and traumatizing and in in broadly speaking a bad mother. So the narcissist didn’t internalize her. One does not internalize a bad mother.
- 05:54 And instead what the narcissist is doing is spending his entire life or her entire life. It applies to female narcissists. Narcissists spend their entire lives looking for an external mother which would provide them with self-n nurturing, self-compassion,
- 06:14 the equivalent of self-love, self-reference, being being seen and obviously an inflated fantastic grandio self-concept. One could say that pathological narcissists what happens is that they are desperately trying to replace the absent maternal archetype
- 06:39 with substitute maternal figures in their lives because otherwise they’re unable to trigger the self- nurturing and self-compassion and self-reference and so on so forth which are critical for not only existence and survival but for a sense of being. Even Jung himself
- 07:03 warned us that the mother archetype can and does have negative aspects. He said that when pathized in the case of psychopathologies, the mother archetype has the potential to transform and transmogriphy suddenly into a possessive dependent and meshed entity,
- 07:28 fusion and merger, a symbiotic state, an absence of separation, individuation. The individuals in these cases said Jung not Vaknim struggled to separate themselves from the influence of their real mothers in order to establish their own sense of identity and the
- 07:48 internalized archetypal mother in these cases is either completely absent because the mother is perceived as coercive, as possessive, as bad, as overbearing, as doineering, as someone to avoid. So there’s no maternal archetype internalized or it is
- 08:07 internalized as a bed archetype as a bad mother archetype. A mother which essentially is out to devour the individual to subsume the individual to assimilate the individual. Never to let the individual become an individual divided from her. Never to allow
- 08:29 separation, individuation. And hence the process that leads in some individuals or some people process that leads to pathological narcissism.
