The mother-child relationship

The mother can be a symbolic image or physical mother. On the one hand, the mother's symbol represents every woman that becomes mum, the ideal mother, the woman since the beginning of time. On the other hand, she is a physical mother of her son.

The mother archetype occurs in various traditions in different forms. In mythology, devouring, wrapping, sucking and hugging are characteristics of the mother. In both cases, the mother can be good or evil. The Great Mother is Mother Mary -while the Terrible mother, as in the story of Hansel and Gretel, is the stepmother who wants to abandon children in the woods. Both are archetypes of the mother, The first protective and loving, the other destructive and evil.

The royal mother is the one who incorporates the archetype role physically in the best way possible. Thus, for the child, the mother is both the collective image of the mother and the real woman who occupies a physical role in the child's life.

When the mother-child relationship is chaotic during child development, it will affect his/her adult life; as an adult, the man/woman will flee the cruel world to take refuge in his mother's arms. He will have an infantile regression with the attempt to rearrange, with child attitude and elementary strategies, a hostile and complex reality. The adult will try to decline the problematic responsibilities that the external world - represented by the female nature of the mother - will present to him. He/she will project his discomfort into the world and, consequently, the world he perceives will never be the right one.

The chaotic and confused child's life created by the mother in adulthood will be transformed into painful projections towards the outside world. The adult will encounter a complex and unfortunate reality entangled with his perception and view of the world. For him/her, facing the difficulties caused by his projections and confronting the terrible mother will have a profound negative impact. The individual must necessarily rediscover his Eros and the meaning now linked. For this reason, he will need the Eros (love) necessary to forgive the pain felt by his mother.