The Great Mother: An analysis of the Archetype, by Erich Neumann

Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List

In this series I discuss the books on Jordan Peterson’s Great Book List in no particular order. My hope is to help those interested understand what they’re getting into and choose which books they decide to take on.

The Great Mother, by Erich Neumann, is an exploration of the feminine archetype. It builds upon his earlier work, The Origins and History of Consciousness, by focusing in on one particular aspect of our journey through consciousness.

What really struck me is how deeply imbedded in our psychological evolution the concept of male/female is. That’s in part what makes new age concepts of gender being a social construct completely unrelated to underlying realities, so toxic. Once you hold that view, it makes the entire history of our psychological evolution, as read through our artifacts across all cultures, completely irrelevant and impossible to understand. It essentially rejects evolution.

In exploring the concept of the feminine archetype, it’d be helpful to first understand what archetype and feminine mean.

Archetype refers to a typical example of a person or thing. For this specific exploration it is a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or…