The Mother (n.) are goddesses throned in no place and no time, reached by no road: formation, transformation, eternal Mind's eternal recreation — they see you not, shadows are all they see.
A Mother (n.) was once our whole world and later became the symbol of the world — mer, mère, mare, Mary, Maya, ma-ma.
A Mother (n.) can wound her child by a morbid tenderness that follows it into adulthood and stretches childhood past its time.
The Mother (n.) rule the fascinating world of primordial images, from which there is all too easily no returning — like Theseus and Peirithous, grown fast to the rocks.
A Mother (n.) is the daemon who challenges the hero to his deeds: without the libido calling him to new dangers he sinks into sloth or longing for the past; heeding it, he must go under or become a hero.
A Mother (n.) protects the son from the darkness of his own psyche, as the father from the world outside — hence the rites that separate him from her.
A Mother (n.) who over-pities and pampers lames her son as surely as the girl who jilts him — his "toughness" only hides the old wound.
A Mother (n.) impresses so deeply as an individual because she is blended with an inborn image of the eternal mother; where she fails, the collective image feels the loss as a balked instinct.
The Mother (n.) is not left behind by ceasing to be one woman's child — a man grows away from his mother naturally but not from the archetype, and the separation suffices only if the archetype is included.
A Mother (n.) exerts her famous influence on the child less in her own person than through the archetype projected on her, which lends her a mythological background, authority and numinosity.
A Mother (n.) is the accidental carrier of an experience that includes all mankind; no frail and fallible woman should be made to bear that appalling burden of meaning alone.
A Mother (n.) is a child's first world and an adult's last.
A Mother (n.) is, for a woman, her own conscious life as conditioned by her sex; for a man, something alien he has yet to experience — which is why he idealizes her.
The Mother (n.) and the daughter contain each other: every woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter, living earlier as a mother, later as a daughter.
A Mother (n.) is the one who, with tireless self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might keep her little son from growing up.
A Mother (n.) is first experienced not as a woman but as the mother — an archetype charged with an immensity of meanings, which goes on colouring our relation to woman, society and the world of feeling for life.
A Mother (n.) is an archetype of origin and matter — the womb, the vessel that carries and nourishes, the foundation of consciousness, and also the darkness that hems one in.
A Mother (n.) who keeps herself unconscious to preserve a satisfactory marriage binds her son as a substitute husband — so he marries a girl inferior to her, or a tyrant who can tear him away.
A Mother (n.) means to the small child a protecting, enfolding, nourishing source of pleasure, not a sexual object; children define her as the one who gives food, and "mamma" names the breast.