The Devouring Mother: The Collective Unconscious in the Time of Corona

by Simon Sheridan

Those who fail to incorporate the shadow are doomed to project it. In the modern materialist West, we don't merely fail to incorporate our shadow, we deny its existence. In The Devouring Mother, author Simon Sheridan takes a journey into the other half of the psyche looking for an archetypal explanation for the social ructions in western society over the last several years beginning with the Trump and Brexit votes and reaching earthquake proportions with the corona event.




Drawing on the work of the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, Sheridan makes the case that the archetype that has been dominant in the west for several decades is The Devouring Mother, a shadow form whose primary qualities include gaslighting, emotional manipulation and guilt tripping all in the name of protecting her children. Sheridan switches between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic to show how The Devouring Mother permeates all levels of society from interpersonal relationships and employment through to large scale political and social movements including corona. A mother implies children and Sheridan identifies the two archetypal children of The Devouring Mother as the acquiescent and the rebellious. In so doing, he provides an explanation for the Trump and Brexit rebellions in politics as well as the broader psychological and cultural drivers inherent in the rise of both Jordan Peterson and Greta Thunberg. He shows that the corona event did not come out of nowhere but represents an escalation of the existing battle going on in the unconscious mind of the West; a battle that is increasingly moving into consciousness and therefore represents the process Jung described as individuation at the both the individual and the societal level. The time has come for the West to face its shadow: The Devouring Mother.

134 pages, Paperback

Published August 18, 2021

Reviews

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This essay collection, adapted from a series of blog posts and published in 2021, is a sequel and companion to The Plague Story (2020). In The Devouring Mother: The Collective Unconscious in the Time of Corona, blogger and author Simon Sheridan continues to interrogate the response to the Covid pandemic, but with a shift of emphasis. Analysing the inner conditions that gave rise to the outer, Sheridan puts 21st-century Western culture on the couch.

Popular interest in Jungian psychology owes its recent revival in part to Jordan Peterson ― the rise of whom, as Sheridan shows, points to an archetype. Apparently, the Devouring Mother, whether personal or collective, leaves her children just two options: acquiescence or rebellion. Peterson, like Trump and Brexit, embodies the latter. And, contrary to appearances, Greta Thunberg fits the former category. Huh? This is where Sheridan’s thinking gets really interesting. ‘Did you notice how all the climate stuff came abruptly to an end as soon as corona kicked off?’ he asks. It seems we merely swapped apocalypse fantasies. As for the reality:

[Climate change and pandemics] are both, to use a very useful distinction coined by John Michael Greer, predicaments, not problems. A problem has a solution. A predicament is something that simply must be worked through. […] If you can convince someone that a predicament is a problem, you can sell them the solution and you can keep selling them the solution because predicaments never end. There will never not be climate change and there will never not be respiratory viruses.

‘Somehow,’ Sheridan says, somewhat more provocatively, in the midst of his take on predicaments, ‘we survived through the ice ages and the warming periods without any modern technology but now we are told that the future of the entire planet is our responsibility.’ This comparison screams out for more context, and such a complex theme deserves in-depth treatment, but instead he switches to analysing the mask as a symbol. Hopefully he’ll explore climate change questions in future essays.

Meanwhile, his delineation of the Devouring Mother – ascendant in the West for several decades but especially since the turn of the century – is compelling. Apparently it was inspired by psychologist Carl Jung’s 1936 essay on Wotan, an archetype implicated in the rise of Nazism. Yet, despite this comparison, Sheridan’s thesis lacks historical background. At what other junctures of history has the Devouring Mother featured? Did Wotan’s retreat and her emergence overlap? Even if readers can extrapolate from Sheridan’s examples and their own knowledge base, a broader frame of reference might have strengthened his case.

And yet these accessible essays provide a topical introduction to the concept of archetypes and what they can tell us about ourselves, individually and collectively.