“Anaclitic Depression and the Arc and Archetype of the Feminine”
Recently I attended this zoom session given by Jungian psychologist Dr. Janice Maxwell, courtesy of the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York City. In the interest of clarity, “Anaclitic” comes from a Greek word that means in the psychological sense “a leaning into” and seeking the approval of others in a quest for perfection. Often, this quest is in pursuit of a “self-oriented perfection.” This search often contributes to social, emotional and intellectual impairment.
This form of depression seemed to first come into the literature in 1949 with a study of impairment in babies who had been separated from their mothers for three months or more. This study of 123 babies, 6 to 9 months, described those who went from being happy, to weepy and unresponsive within this period. Babies would withdraw, lose weight and experience insomnia. The damage was done after three months with one-third of babies dying.
Dr. Maxwell’s focus is more broadly on the archetype of the mother and how this eternal influence, this psychological power and symbolic vessel can affect and influence the daughter throughout her life. In this context the speaker examines the archetype of the mother, the feminine, and explores the influence that this compelling, one-sided world view will have on a daughter’s psychology and life. There are very few relationships the daughter has that the mother doesn’t touch, from friends and acquaintances to lovers. Equally important, the archetype of the mother speaks to the daughter’s psyche and how she perceived and received the world.
The instructor broadens the psychological field based on developments in the space and her own findings. Again, she thinks anaclitic depression, though perhaps first diagnosed in neglected and abandoned children, can also be observed in women of all ages who have experienced “affective deprivation.” She notes that there are many ways a daughter can be separated from her mother. The daughter might have received clothes and food but not held so that she is cut-off from emotional support. The psychological damage can still be substantial.
Dr. Maxwell reminds us that the mother/daughter relationship is complicated and at times perhaps unconscious. She referred to the “Abilene Paradox” in which an individual tends to go along with group decisions though she privately might object. This deference can begin at an early age and be very damaging.
That the mother can be “absent” in many ways over time can contribute to a lifetime of psychological issues. The instructor goes to the Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child” to convey the psychological brutality of a lost or discarded childhood. She notes that depression and despair, as well as the lack of will to live, can be the result of the absent mother within of the archetype of the feminine.
Dr. Maxell expands her field of inquiry, referring to the absence of the “Mother-ground” in adults or that archetypal ground where the feminine influence feeds the spirit and the soul. Culture can take on the compelling psychology of the day. She notes that the “Great Depression” was also an “Anaclitic Depression” given how profoundly it affected the heart and soul of the nation.
Maxwell sees the same “withering of souls” present in the culture and society today. She points to prisons, nursing homes, and the fortune of many working families who are cut off from affection. She notes that this can be similar to dying. The profile seems apparent: outward anger, inward anger, apathy and detachment with its scar tissue and unhealed wounds.
She asks rhetorically whether anaclitic depression can lead to dementia. She suggests the answer is “yes,” adding that there is sufficient research that suggests being cut off from the feminine archetype, emotional support, and in a sense, mother-earth, can affect our “transition” to another world.
Dr. Maxwell reminds us that Freud built his psychology around the Archetypal Father and Jung around the Archetypal Mother with the anima or feminine principle at the center. She mentions an American Indian ritual in which on the fourth day after birth a child, without a name, is presented to the sun, sky, cosmos and new life. The cosmos is asked to accept the child and the archetypal mother. The Divine Infant is held by the Great Mother. This theme and motif have found their way into art through the ages.
The different views of these archetypes in time led to the split between Freud and Jung, though this clarity has come with time. According to the instructor, Jung argued that the mother archetype carried the spirit of life incarnated in the feminine, and a way to transcendence.
And as many have noted, the loss of the archetypal mother means the loss of soul, even death. Yeats refers to this fate in his “The Second Coming” in which he writes about the cultural container not holding. Some observers have seen this poem as being about the Second Coming or the end of the world. The ceremony of innocence is drowned. Yeats asks: “What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
Literally, the poem might be referring to World War I or other threats at the beginning of the twentieth century. The earth was “rumbling” then. Our instructor also saw the poem in these stark terms. The world’s container was not holding. There was a sense of abandonment and depression. She also suggests these developments as signaling the loss of some archetypal energy associated with the feminine that increasingly was being viewed through a patriarchal lens.
Furthermore she adds that religion, including Christianity which, among other things is a symbolic container, doesn’t channel the mother archetype, doesn’t channel the feminine. According to Jung we are out of equilibrium in our personal and collective psychology. In the second-half of life there is little connection to the archetypal mother. Similarly, there is a repression of the feminine by both men and women.
The instructor suggests that a deep connection to the archetypal feminine is a life-saver in some respects and is necessary from a point of view of psychological wholeness. The libido must be taken back and the archetype must change as we grow older. We need new libido energy, new images and, in a sense, new styles of psychological architecture and, as the poet Auden writes, “a change of heart.”
As Dr. Maxwell notes, women bring life and culture. Men bring order. In her opinion the government, churches and corporations are failing; and the old order must go. A new mythology needs to arise. However, she acknowledges there is danger in new archetypal energy flooding the plains, as in the coming of Christ and what is expressed in the Judeo myths. And she reminds the class that Jung was aware of dangers afoot during such psychological and archetypal shifts. She refers to him as a “mediator” of these images and how he shows the way forward in his lifelong search for new archetypal energy. He was a lifelong student of alchemy, looking for what has been hidden and repressed. His search for the “hidden mother,” the number two personality, was central to Jung’s “The Red Book,” which represented a life’s work and was finally published in 2016.
Jung’s charge for us to embrace the image also meant embracing the universe and the mother-earth archetype. The instructor suggested that the world needs a new “birthing;” “we need an archetypal field within ourselves.” In some respect this statement seems to get at the heart of Jung’s intention with “The Red Book,” to throw off the shackles of psychology, culture, and war — all the things that divide the psyche. Jung has said that the “The Red Book” was an attempt “to regain soul and overcome the malaise of spiritual alienation.” It was also an attempt to reassert the importance of the “unconscious” that has been pushed aside by the fantasy of a rational world. Through his visions, dreams and fantasies Jung re-imagined the union of opposites: the integration of the anima for men and the animus for women.
After Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious drew to a close, his “confrontation with the world began.” He had become disillusioned with the scientific rationale and the “spirit of the times,” and successfully sought the “spirit of the depths” through dreams, visions and myths. In effect, Jung’s work was the beginning of the “revisioning” of psychology with more attention to the unconscious and the archetypal feminine, full presence in the psychological godhead.
I’ll close with the final words of “Petition,” a poem by W.H. Auden: “Harrow the house of the dead, looking shining at, New styles of architecture, a change of heart.”
