The "Motherland": An Archetypal and Postcolonial Reading of Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad

Working at the intersection of postcolonial and archetypal criticism, this article investigates the role of women in resistance literature by looking at a piece of postcolonial Arabic fiction, Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad (1969). Rooted in Arab politics concerning land rights and anti-Zionist struggle, the text offers a related archetypal approach to the depiction of women in politicized literature. Umm Saad allegorizes the struggles of Palestinians to reclaim their land. A poor peasant woman, the titular heroine embodies the intimate connection between Palestinians and their land, acting as a helper to combative men and a primal symbol for attachment to the enduring land. Umm Saad is a personal mother and a trope for a feminized colonized territory, metaphorically representing the Palestinian nation and assuming mythological features enabling her to identify with the Earth Mother to send a message against dispossession. Since she embodies positive mother archetype symbolism (the personal mother and the Earth Mother), she acts as a source of fertility and protection. Expressing a political statement via the mother archetype, Kanafani appeals to a basic human need, i.e. the need to settle down in one’s land, which makes woman an indispensible part of the collective unconscious of any nation. Keywords: Archetypal Criticism; Kanafani; Mother(land); Postcolonial Arabic Fiction; Umm Saad.

Human safety issue in the context of contemporary challenges from the postmodern perspective

The current global crises, the health crisis and the information wars and their axiological aspects, have created risks and threats to the security of human beings and societies. The postmodern approach comes with a skepticism, subjectivism and relativism, a suspicion of the foundations of Western culture. Their systematic destruction, the use of language to promote an ideology becomes the source of chaos and decreases the degree of social cohesion in any society. The values of the postmodern world, tolerance and equality, come into conflfl ict with the traditional society that had at the top of the hierarchy a truth of a religious nature. The current COVID-19 crisis leads to a dangerous mutation of two state archetypal modelsT. Hobbes’s leviathan with C. G Jung’s devouring mother archetype, leads to a the limitation in rights and a degradation of the human being. In the curent information wars to ensure the security of the citizen, axiological immunization provides the way for global problems at the local level.

JUNG’S CONCEPT OF ARCHETYPES IN FEMINIST REVISIONIST MYTHOLOGY, IN THE CONTEXT OF M. ATWOOD’S PENELOPIAD AND M. MILLER’S CIRCE

The article deals with the concept of archetypes by K. G. Jung in the context of M. Atwood’s The Penelopiad and M. Miller’s Circe, which represent feminist revisionist mythology tradition. The study focuses on exploring the transformation of the Jungian archetypes of the figures of Penelope and Circe in Atwood and Miller’s novels. The author argues that while in original myths Penelope and Circe represent the archetypes of Mother and the feminine representation of Wise old man, in the novels Penelope’s archetype transforms into Mask, and Circe starts representing Mother archetype. The author comes to the conclusion that such transformation is a result of Atwood and Miller’s dealing with feminist agenda as well their attempt to present different sides of female experience, making mythological figures closer to real women.

THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE and HANDS ON HIPS MOTIF

Symbols have become the most important tool for the human being’s self-expression from the first cave paintings to architecture. Each symbol has formed with values such as a message, thought and wish. In the memory of almost in every culture, the definition of weaving has been done over concepts such as eternity, immortality and plentifulness, however there is scarcely any data about their starting point. Archetype concept can be used to fill in these data blanks. Archetypes, propounded by the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, modelling the human character and collective unconscious relations, have been efficient in bringing the mythological elements to come in sight. Concepts such as great mother and mother goddess, showing similarity in many geographies, is the biggest example of the mythologies shaped with collective unconscious. Many motifs in weaving involve mythological elements. Therefore, the relation between motif and archetype will provide benefits for defining the output sources of symbols. One of the most important archetypes developed by Jung is the “Mother” archetype. The motif which corresponds to mother archetype is the Hands on Hips in Anatolian weavings. Literature survey has been conducted in this study, emphasizing the relation between one of the symbolic building blocks of Turkish weaving arts; Hands on Hips motif and the mother archetype and as a result of the study, it is surmised that mother archetype has been a precipitating element in motherhood concept in reflecting to the motifs. Key Words: Hands on Hips Motif, Mother Archetype, Weaving, Carl Gustav Jung.

A Psychoanalysis of Female Characters in the Novels Heat and Dust and Inside the Haveli : Function of Mother Archetype in the Characters of the Narrator and Geeta

The psychoanalysts enhance our understanding of our consciousness, the self and self-identity. Psychoanalytic theory plays an important role in the comprehension of the fundamental condition of selfhood. The self is not an unified entity in psychoanalytical terms. Human subject emerges as an outcrop of the unconscious desire. After Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, a swiss psychologist is considered as an eminent contributor to psychoanalysis who theorized the concept of collective unconscious. The purpose of my study is to find out the presence of the collective unconscious and to analyse two female characters, The Narrator , from the novel Heat and Dust and Geeta from Inside the Haveli with the help of Jung's theory of collective unconscious and mother archetype. In this research paper several theoretical concepts of Carl Jung are used to analyse the female characters. Jung’s theories are applied during the analysis process such as personal conscious, collective conscious and archetypes. I would use qualitative method for the analysis of the characters of the Narrator and Geeta. I would use important dialogues and incidents for the data collection for the analysis of the characters. The psychoanalytic study of the Narrator and Geeta shows that they both have collective unconscious. I would study the function of mother archetype in the life of the Narrator and Geeta

The Legacy of the Terrible Mother Archetype in Post-War British Drama

The theatre provides the playwrights with a public platform through which they open up a more comprehensive framework to reinterpret the concept of the feminine. The chapter, in which translation remains a fundamental instrument that will be utilized to offer new interpretations to old ideas about the feminine, explores how the post-war British woman playwright Ann Jellicoe translates a women-related myth and reinterprets the concept of the feminine in The Sport of My Mad Mother (w.1958, r.1962). In this context, the chapter focuses on the concept of the Terrible Mother archetype which represents the female creative power as well as the potential for destruction in the play within a special reference to Jung's premises on the archetypal nature of the femininity and maternity. Thus, the chapter indicates that Ann Jellicoe, taking on board and challenging the perceived social, ideological, and psychological ideals of femininity, reclaims the legacy of the female strength.

When the Great Mother Met the Harlequin: Jung and Neumann on Art, Archetypes and The Spirit Of The Times

Where Sigmund Freud famously failed to engage seriously and openly with Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra (1980 [1883-85]), C.G. Jung developed his psychological theory on the basis of a thorough critical engagement with the text and even dedicated a five-year long seminar series to its interpretation (1934-39). But similar to Freud before him he often developed a blind eye to his own contemporary literature and art. As Jung’s writings on Joyce’s Ulysses (Jung 1932) or Picasso’s paintings make (Jung 1932a) evident he tended to reject the symbolic dimension of modernist art and literature and regarded it as a sheer product of the spirit of the times. Again, it was a psychologist of the next generation, Erich Neumann, whose adaptation of Jung’s theory made it possible to apply archetypal theory to modernist art. This article will follow the key differences between Jung’s and Neumann’s understanding of art and literature by looking at their interpretations of main examples of modernism. KEYWORDS Erich Neumann, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, the Great Mother archetype.

The Black Sun

This paper draws on my doctoral research into the experience of psychological infanticide. Weaving together infanticidal attachment theory, the psychohistory of infant murder, and pre-natal psychology regarding the experience of the unwelcome child before birth, I explore the alchemical image of the black sun and the Death Mother archetype as expressions of pre-birth annihilation terror. I argue that during pregnancy, the unwelcome foetus and unwilling mother form an infanticidal attachment centred on their shared experiences of helpless terror, and utilising mutual survival strategies of dissociation that orient the child towards death rather than life. From my perspectives as a psychotherapist and a former patient, I explore how terror of the Death Mother reveals itself in dreams, symptoms, fantasies, and in the transference, and consider how we might engage with such life-destroying forces.