ABSTRACT
The mother imago — and the mother-child dyad implicit in the mother complex — continues its crucial role throughout life as the ground of one's security and sense of well-being. Our ability to meet the needs and demands of body and psyche are founded upon early experiences of receiving care, experiences which we daily reenact. Self-nurturing and adaptive functions involve intersections between the mother complex, its archetypal core, and the differentiations between mother and self that comprise ego consciousness. The individual whose archetypal expectations had been adequately met in the early environment is sufficiently capable of meeting the needs of the psyche-soma by drawing upon the supporting imago of the good mother.
