The 'Holy Mother' and the shadow: revisiting Jung's work on the quaternity

Through a series of clinical vignettes, this paper considers the impact of religious belief, specifically Roman Catholicism, on the psyche and development of mind; in particular, there will be a focus on the influences of the conflation of maternal beliefs with a Catholic belief system when the loss or absence of the father is a primary factor. Further, it will be shown in case examples that split off aspects of the personal shadow such as conflicted and aggressive emotions related to mother and father can conflate with the collective numinous and religious aspects of the 'dark side' of the God-representation and result in 'religious' persecutory symptoms. This has a debilitating effect on the emerging personality, leaving it prone to fears, anxieties and psychotic pockets of experience when there is a numinous persecutory shadow in the background that affects and limits the individual's development. The implications and findings drawn from the clinical vignettes are used to consider the impact of an interrelationship and conflation between aspects of the psyche and religious beliefs. Jung's work on the Trinity and the 'problem of the fourth' (Jung 1942/1948/1991) is also reconsidered in relation to the role of the feminine, the maternal and the 'reality of matter'. A diagram of the multiple levels of the quaternity is used to elaborate and expand on Jung's concept.