The Great Mother

An Analysis of the Archetype (Bollingen Series)

By: Erich Neumann, Ralph Manheim - foreword, Martin Liebscher - translator

Narrated by: Mark Meadows

This audiobook narrated by Mark Meadows gives an illuminating account of the Great Mother as a primordial image of the human psyche

In this book, renowned analytical psychologist Erich Neumann draws on ritual, mythology, art, and records of dreams and fantasies to examine how the archetype of the Great Mother has been outwardly expressed in many cultures and periods since prehistory. He shows how the feminine has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun, vessel, and every animal from snakes to birds. Neumann discerns a universal experience of the maternal as both nurturing and fearsome, an experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized by the Great Mother. With a foreword by Martin Liebscher, The Great Mother is a profound and enduring work by one of the most brilliant thinkers of the twentieth century.

©2026 Erich Neumann (P)2026 Princeton University Press