The Mad Mother Series by Ann McCoy

Jan 25, 2010 Daniel Mirante in Interviews 6 Comments Tags: archetypes, dreams, initiation, Jung

The images in Ann McCoy’s works come from dreams, a process known as incubation in the Greek world. Incubation, a “sleeping in”, was used to record dreams for therapeutic and prophetic ends. For McCoy, dreams represent a philogenetically older mode of thought linked to nature and very much needed as a counterbalance in our “rational”, scientific world. The unconscious is no mere repository of the past, but contains the seeds of future healing. Dreams are letters from the gods and the animal spirits. For McCoy, dreams are linked to an inner transformation process described in alchemical symbolism. The Alchemical Great Work, and the personal dream life fuse, as part of the path to the realization of the Self.

My mother had spent the last fifteen years of her life in an institution near Pasadena. She was considered a very difficult case, insulting nurses, asking for bourbon. She weighed eighty-five pounds the last three years of her life and was bed ridden. Her mind had clouded over with something called ”wet brain” ; she had never recovered from her last attack of the D.T’s. During my childhood she spent every afternoon in her room drinking, her will of iron and taught frame keeping the house in rigid order.

My brother, a kinder person than myself, had asked me to drive up to see her. It had been three years. The drive on the freeway was long. When we arrived, she was in a coma-like state. The nurse shook her and told her we had arrived. Her eyes shot open. “Go home”, were her last words to us. She died soon after at ninety-one. When the call came about her death, I went into shock. She was my adopted mother, my tormentor: we had a terrible relationship. I expected to feel relief, instead I found myself sinking into a deep depression that lasted several months.

The idea of a period of darkness being followed by a period of illumination or regeneration is found throughout literature. The fifteenth century alchemists referred to the darkness as the nigredo, and the lighter whitening process as the albedo. “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Saint John of the Cross, a Catholic mystic, describes this inner process. In psychoanalysis a period of depression means that one has to go to the depths of the unconscious before a breakthrough can occur; in this way depression can have a positive role in the life of the individual. Esther Harding, a member of Jung’s inner circle, wrote a wonderful article entitled, “The Meaning and Value of Depression”. After reading it I no longer feared depression, even though I had a ten -year clinical depression.

Years of analysis in the United Sates and Zurich, hours had been spent discussing my mother. I knew the Miller Fantasies, the Imagio Mater, the “battle for deliverance for the mother.” Ruthanna had filled pages of my dream notebooks. What could I possibly be left to say or feel about her? I thought of the duel mother, Melanie Klein, the two sides of my mother’s face. One side was radically different from the other, one totally mad and malevolent, and the opposite side more normal. My memories of this split as a small child made me appreciate Melanie Klein’s work as well as Jung’s.

I had a dream shortly after my mother’s death. I was in a bloody underworld not unlike the chamber of horrors described in “The Visions of Zosimos” of Panopolis from a third century AD alchemical text. I saw my mother as a huge spider with her face reflected in the eyes. I am on a slab being sacrificed. The dream was a wake-up call that parts of myself needed to be sacrificed and transformed. I was very much caught in a negative mother complex like the spider’s web. The “Mad Mother Series” came out of this dream.
 
My mother suffered from alcoholism, depression, and later dementia.  In my own life I have had to come to terms with those parts of the mother that had become parts of my own personality. We take on the parent as an internal figure, the imago mater.  I quit drinking at 24 but that was just the beginning. The rest of my mother’s personality was very rooted in my conscious and unconscious life. I suffered long periods of depression, paralysis, and isolation.

The breakthrough for me came when I had a dream that my mother and I were swimming in a river with the bodies of lepers.  I am in the water with my mother; we are in the same soup, the same complex. The work “Washing the Leprous Mother in the Jordan” came from this dream.

In the Bible, bathing in the Jordan cures Neumann, the leper.  In alchemy “the leprous of the metals” refers to problems in the process.  My mother had always kept a stone from the Jordan River in her ivory reliquary box, so the Jordan River had a personal association relating to my mother and the idea of religious pilgrimage.  In India there is the Kumba Mele, a huge festival where millions bath in the Ganges.  I have seen smaller examples of ritual river bathing in Nepal and India.  There is also a wonderful fresco, in a closed Roman convent, which shows Constantine bathing in a tub to be cured of the pox or some other disease. The bathing in the river is not only healing but represents a kind of baptism. 

For me the dream led to a rebirth of sorts and a path out of the negative mother complex and the depression. In the dream the water started to sparkle with bits of light, and changed in a wonderful way. This “solutio” began to dissolve the complex, put it into solution. I was able to dump a lot of the negative traits I had inherited and a new attitude could come forth.  The river was a kind of baptism, an entry into a new life. Even if our personality is a reaction against the negative mother, we are caught in one side of an opposite. I had been swinging on a spider’s thread between the opposites. In alchemy the opposites are brought together and a new third middle ground may be found.

 “Lunar Birth” shows a devastated landscape. I dreamed of such a place like a primordial swamp. You see this devastated landscape before the sun rises in plate 22 of the “Splendor Solis.” In my dream a glimmer of light began to appear over a blackened landscape. A group of crows flew from the area as a boat sailed in. One of the crows had my face as a child. The crow is a symbol par excellence of the Nigredo, the dark state in alchemy. For me this had to do with a dawn after a depression.

The child represents new possibilities in dreams and visions.  In a symbolic way Christ as a child represents spiritual renewal in the individual as well as the collective.  Erich Neumann has written a wonderful book on the meaning of the child in dreams. In the dream I saw a little girl child glowing like a lamp, illuminating the landscape. This was an “inner child” I had never been allowed to experience. The numinosity of the figure gives her another dimension; she has a link to the transpersonal. In another way the girl child represents the divine feminine so repressed in our culture. I drew the child, modeled on a Christ child, wearing a dress. The child represents feminine divinity.

Sanctuary comes from an experience I had in the temple at Ranachpur in India, one of the great Jain temples in the world.  The Jains are one of the oldest religions in India.  They believe in forgiveness and incorporate it in a confessional festival called Perysiana where all Jains spend nine days contemplating forgiveness as well as in a daily ritual.  The experience in the temple was what a religious writer would call a “peak experience”.  I felt that my inner sanctuary had become mirrored in this outer sanctuary. More amazing still is that the plan for the Ranakpur temple came from one man’s dream.  In the Catholic world the closest example I can think of is Santa Maria Magore in Rome which was built from a vision about snow falling in the shape of the cathedral.  Snow fell on the 5 August, 358 AD in the shape of the cathedral, this is called “the miracle of the snows”.   The temenos, or sacred precinct often exists first as a vision, or dream, and then materializes in the outer world.

As I was finishing “Sanctuary” a baby deer walked out of the woods into my garden. I saw it nose to nose with my dog. The deer followed us around for sever hours. I became concerned and said,”you must go back to your mother.” The deer followed us like a puppy back into the forest, and then stayed there as we returned home. In Ireland the fairies ride on the backs of deer. The deer goes from forest to city garden and is an animal of the liminal realm. I put the deer into the drawing. It had come to tell me I was on the right track.   

For me dreams are letters from the gods.  This is nothing new, Artemidoris of Daldis wrote The Interpretation of Dreams in the second century AD. Century A. D.  The Bible is full of dream prophecy.  Every major world religion contains examples of dreams as prophecy. If anything dreams were considered a philogenitically older mode of thought.  In Jainism, each Jina or saints birth is announced by certain dreams.  The Age of Enlightenment and the Reformations relegated dream prophecy to “superstition and fortune telling” even in the Catholic Church.  Once heralded as windows on enlightenment and revelation, dreams were tossed into the dustbin until the birth of modern psychoanalysis.  In the Jewish world dreamers like Reb Hile Weshsler (1881) who told of a forthcoming catastrophe “ a dark cloud descending over Germany” were ignored.  Freud interpreted dreams from the standpoint of repressed memories, instinct and sexuality.  Only Jung viewed dreams as windows to the soul.

For me the dream is a treasure, something of great value.  First I record them, then research part off their content and meditate on it.  If a dream resonates in a certain way or is part of a series, or is linked to synchronistic events in my life, I pay particular attention to it.  In the dreams I “see “sections of the drawings.  Usually one big dream gives me the core idea of each work.  The process is organic.  As I work I have new dreams which alter the outcome of the work.  No beginning sketch exists except a general idea in my idea.  As I work I rearrange the drawings, the final product is always a surprise to me.

A later dream was of 12 babies in a landscape. “White Birth” came out of these dreams. I was reminded of an alchemical drawing with 12 babies in alchemist’s glassware. I also thought of a drawing by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher where small wax figures are floating in glass globes. The babies were new possibilities; the unconscious was giving birth.

The white horse in the original dream was with the babies. In a most general way the horse represents horsepower, energy. An Irish museum guard told me about a white horse in Irish mythology. Perhaps this horse was in my genes; I come from a family of Irish horse trainers and was a rider.

Visit Ann McCoy’s website at www.annmccoy.com