by any other nurse when “his” nurse was in the vicinity.^1
Some new mothers experience an immediate attachment to their
newborn; a fiercely protective love and deep tenderness toward this
infant wells up in them as they hold the precious, helpless baby to
whom they have just given birth. We say that the baby evokes the
mother archetype in such women. For other new mothers, however,
maternal love grows over a period of months, becoming obvious by
the time the baby is eight or nine months old.
When having a baby does not activate “the mother” in a woman,
the woman usually knows that she isn’t feeling something other
mothers feel, or something she herself has felt for another child. The
child misses a vital connection when “the mother” archetype isn’t
activated, and keeps yearning for it to occur. (Although, as happened
with nurses at the Greek orphanage, the archetypal mother-child
pattern can be fulfilled through a woman who is not the biological
mother.) And yearning for that missed attachment can continue into
adulthood. One forty-nine-year-old woman, who was in a women’s
group with me, wept as she spoke of her mother’s death, because
now that her mother was dead that hoped-for connection could
never develop.
Just as “the mother” is a deeply felt way of being that a child can
activate in a woman, so also each child is “programmed” to seek
“the mother.” In both mother and child (and therefore in all humans),
an image of mother is associated with maternal behavior and emo-
tion. This inner image at work in the psyche—an image that determ-
ines behavior and emotional responses unconsciously—is an arche-
type.
“The Mother” is only one of many archetypes—or latent, internally
determined roles—that can become activated in a woman. When
we recognize the different archetypes, we can see more clearly what
is acting in us and in others. In this book, I will be introducing arche-
types that are active in women’s psyches and that are personified
as Greek goddesses. For example, Demeter, the maternal goddess,
is an embodiment of the mother archetype. The others are
Persephone (the daughter), Hera (the wife), Aphrodite (the lover),
Artemis (the sister and competitor), Athena (the strategist), and
Hestia (the hearthkeeper). As names for archetypes, of course, the
Goddesses in Everywoman