Haunted – the Death Mother Archetype

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The disturbing experience of psychological infanticide reflects the darkest aspect of the wounding of the Sacred Feminine – the Death Mother archetype that annihilates rather than nurtures life.  Through myth, story, classic literature, biography, poems, art and dreams, Dr. Violet Sherwood weaves together symbolic aspects of psychological infanticide with psychoanalytic theory of traumatic attachment and the literal truth of a centuries-old history of infanticide.

 

 

 

 

Description

 

The disturbing experience of psychological infanticide reflects the darkest aspect of the wounding of the Sacred Feminine – the Death Mother archetype that annihilates rather than nurtures life.

Through myth, story, classic literature, biography, poems, art and dreams, Dr. Violet Sherwood weaves together symbolic aspects of psychological infanticide with psychoanalytic theory of traumatic attachment and the literal truth of a centuries-old history of infanticide.

She illuminates the Death Mother archetype in the dynamic between the unwilling (or unsupported) mother and the unwelcome child. Her personal and archetypal journey into, through, and beyond the underworld, offers hope and guidance for the restoration of the relationship between the Sacred Feminine and the Divine Child.

She draws on her professional experience as a psychotherapist and her lived experience of psychological infanticide as a result of closed stranger adoption to explore the intimate connection between life and death, revealing the life task of the infanticided psyche is to embrace death and discover the life that lies beyond the realm of the underworld.

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Haunted: the Death Mother Archetype is a wonder of a book. Dr. Sherwood’s impeccable scholarship undergirds a transformative dance between the imaginative capacity of soul, and the harsh realities embedded in her subject matter.” –Mary Harrell, PhD

Table of Contents

-List of Figures 
-Foreword
-Acknowledgments 
-Dedication 
-Prologue 
-Introduction
PART ONE: SETTING THE SCENE FOR A MURDER INQUIRY
-Chapter One: A Haunting 
-Literary Ghosts 
-Soul Murder 
-Infanticidal Attachment 
-Nineteenth-century Baby Farming 
-Closed Stranger Adoption 
-Imaginal Psychology, Archetypes, and Mythology 
-Psychobiography, Biomythography, and Other Forms of
-Transformational Writing 
-Haunting 
-The Experience of Psychological Infanticide as Recorded in Stories, Myths and Personal Voices 
-The Orphan 
-The Feral Child 
-The Bereaved Child
-Chapter Two: Researching Apparitions 
-Methodology and Methods 
-Making the Invisible Visible
-A Containing Methodology for Personal Process
-The Methodology 
-Imaginal Inquiry in Practice 
-Imaginal Psychology: Haunted by Archetypes and a Map for a Heroic Quest 
-Embodied Research and a Theoretical Womb 
-Healing Fictions: Writing as a Process of Discovery, Illumination and Transformation 
-Writing as a Transformative Process 
-Chapter Three: Infanticidal Attachment 
-A Mythology of Infanticide
-The Psychohistory of Childhood
-Infanticidal Attachment Theory 
-Exploration of Terms and Concepts 
-Pre- and Peri-natal Trauma 
-The Child’s Fear of Infanticide and the Nature of Infanticidal Trauma 
-Myth, Trauma, and the Body: Embodied Experience as a Portal to Understanding 
-Medusa: Face of the Death Mother 
-Chapter Four: Nineteenth-Century Baby Farming: A Crucial Link with Adoption 
-The Desperate Struggle for Survival 
-The Makin Family 
-Murder or Manslaughter? 
-A Family Business 
-Factory Farming
-A Note on Language 
PART TWO: SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
-Chapter Five: Murderousness 
-Psychological Infanticide and Murderous Rage
-Murderous Rage Enacted Against Others or Turned Against the Self 
-Chapter Six: Abandonment 
-Literal Abandonment 
-Left for Dead: The Orphan and the Feral Child
-The Feral Child
-Chapter Seven: Opium
-The Use of Opium to Relieve Pain and Subdue Children
-Thinking about Minnie Dean 
-A Romantic Sensibility of Opium as a Creative-Destructive Persona 
-Relationships between Pain, Trauma, Dissociation and Addiction 
-Chapter Eight: Neglect 
-Baby Farmers and Intentional Neglect 
-Institutional Neglect
-Psychological Neglect and the Adoption Solution 
-Ascetism, Anorexia, and the Anchorite as Responses to
-Psychological Neglect 
PART THREE: PSYCHOLOGICAL INFANTICIDE: A PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SYNTHESIS 
-Chapter Nine: Eclipse: The Alchemy of the Non-existent Self 
-The Ghost Self 
-Eclipse: The Alchemical Black Sun
-Via Negativa
-The Mystery of Psychological Infanticide 
-Adoption: A Tale of Psychological Murder, Ghosts, and Hauntings 
-Chapter Ten: Minnie Dean and a Poetics of Engagement
-Introducing Minnie 
-Oamaru: A Victorian Interlude 
-Yearning for the Child Killer 
-The Language of Flowers
-Postscript 
-Chapter Eleven: Solutio: The Alchemy of Drowning and the ‘Trauma-world’ 
-Solutio 
-Womb and Tomb
-Melusine and the Archetypal Feminine 
-Chapter Twelve: Conversations in the Dark
-References
-Appendix 
-Minnie Dean – A Brief Chronology of Events 

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