I watched Hitchcock’s (1960) Psycho. Nothing I’m going to say in this post is new. Other, more educated and insightful thinkers have commented on this movie before (just google “Freudian themes in Hitchcock’s Psycho” to pull up previous articles), but as it is still being used as source material in depth psychology as a commentary on our collective attitude towards women, I think it’s worth exploring again.
I won’t go into a deep analysis of the movie, but I’ll briefly talk about what struck me as important in regards to our current cultural experience as well as my personal experience as a mother in the world of art and academia.
Psycho is a collective dream; the above promo image powerfully speaks to the disembodied mother in the movie. Mother is both absent and eerily present in the unoccupied chair, the fearful and suspicious looks of the 3 characters in the background gives us clues as to how she is felt. There are no “present” mothers in the film. Mother is talked about, but never truly appears. Marion’s coworker casually mentions her mother – illustrating the enmeshment of mother/animus prominent in the film. Norman’s mother is simply a voice we hear, her presence manifests the same way as the coworker’s mother via the telephone; a voice without a body. Both mothers are invisible forces influencing the dream characters and both are shadow aspects of the Mother Archetype. As pictured here as the empty chair, Mother is not present in tangible form, but only a “presence”, an energetically felt phenomenon. She is a token of Culture, twisted and used for it’s own aims but denied a whole and healthy means of expression.
This past spring, I attended the Chico review in Montana, put on by Charcoal Books. Sally Mann was booked as a keynote speaker but sadly, she was unable to due to litigation regarding her family pictures. She was a felt absence for the entirety of the review. As the headlining draw for me, finding out she was not going to be there was devastating, especially as a fellow mother showcasing images involving my children.
Mann’s presence was felt during the review, but in the form of her absence, and I saw this reflected in that out of the 100 people in attendance, only a handful were mothers, a demonstration of the inaccessibility of the art world for women with children, particularly those with young children. Though I do not see this as a reflection of Charcoal’s omission of mothers – far from it – it is a realization that our culture as a whole first demands motherhood of women and then denies them any other form of expression.
Mothers may take picture of their children, but they must be sweet and soft and happy. They must not challenge our cultural narratives around the innocence of childhood – this is an act, not only of social treason, but a treason against motherhood. Mann’s mothering has been under fire since her pictures first entered the public sphere and 35 years later we have made little progress. Had Mann been an actual “man” – like Jock Sturges for example – her images may still have come under fire (as his did), but they would not have been used as a commentary on her abilities and/or worthiness as a parent. Though Sturges is not a parent, fathers, in every field, are not sentenced to the same cultural expectations that mothers are. The disembodied mother in art is the absence of women bodies in artistic spaces and though we talk about them (as David Campany did during his Chico keynote speech on Magdelina Wyrot’s Petska), they tend to be largely missing from the room.
This brings me to Jung.
The potent self-reflection tools that C.G. Jung embodies in his psychology are largely inaccessible to mothers as they require the one thing that mothers lack; Time. There are two times a day that mothers might engage with Jung’s tools of dream documentation, active imagination, and intense academic study – after bedtime, and before the kids wake up. Anyone who has had to deal with young children for longer than a 24hr period knows that bedtime is fluid and mothering exhaustion is a vampire sucking away minutes, often hours from our day. A daily routine of writing down dreams becomes a bi-monthly occurance, at best.
Depth Psychology mirrors Art’s ‘unintentional’ exclusion of mothers; all of the founding women scholars of Jungian psychology were childless; Marion Woodman, Toni Wolff, Marie Louise Von Franz, Hannah Barbara, Aniela Jaffe, Esther Harding, just to name a few. Many of these women contributed to the Jungian theory concept of the Mother Archetype, while, like the men of Jungian theory, lacking any embodied experience (the expectations, limitations, and dichotomies) of mothering children.
In the The Wisdom of the Dream Vol 1, Jung says of his Bollingen Tower “without my piece of earth, my life’s work would not have come into being.” With access to a private “room of his own” Jung could seclude himself from his daily life, his duties as a husband and father, and sink into his own musings and interests for days at a time. By his own admission, had he been a mother, his life’s work may never have seen the light of day for a mother would never have been granted the luxury of her own private tower. A father may leave home for as long as he deems fit to do “his important work” but the same freedoms are not granted the mother of their children. The pressure to attend to Jung’s children obviously fell solely elsewhere. Mothers are expected to be home with their children and if they do embark on careers, they are expected to do so in a way that does not infringe on their role as a parent. To be an absent father is to create a life’s legacy, to be an absent mother is an unpardonable sin.
If we are to pursue art, erudition, or psychic wholeness, a mother must fight tooth and nail for every inch of time for herself; she is limited in her abilities to devote to herself and her aspirations because she is mother. Unless, of course, she embarks on divorce. The mother, divorced from the tyrannical expectations of maleness finds again the precious time she was denied in matrimony. The children’s time now split between mom and dad, the divorced mother is able to find the childless time and space to breathe into herself once more. Yet this is only in cases of joint or shared custody, when the woman has reliable support in the form of her ex-partner (Marielle Heller’s 2024 Nightbitch is a potent yet optimistic example of this dynamic at play and every father should watch it). If she is able to create a body of work and to find a place for herself in the worlds of Art and Academia, she can be sure that the limiting societal expectations of her as mother – as Mann knows well – will come banging on her door.
No wonder the negative mother comes crazed and wielding a knife. Disembodied and clothed in maleness, Mother stabs at the woman who would be set free of her man-made chains. Locked in a hilltop house decomposing, no wonder she’s raving mad.
