The Death Mother as Nature's Shadow: Infanticide, Abandonment, and the Collective Unconscious

The archetypal Death Mother symbolizes women whose behavior or feelings threaten the lives of their children. Western culture, however, believes that women evolved to love their children instinctively and selflessly, and that women who abandon, neglect, harm, or kill their children are unnatural. Thus the Death Mother has no place in our cultural consciousness. This can be problematic, because it means that the Death Mother is buried deep in the shadow and surrounded with shame.