Evolution Archives - Daniela Sieff

Meeting ‘The Death Mother Archetype’

In a wide-ranging conversation, Sara Avant Stover and I explored Death Mother from several perspectives. Sara’s own insights prompted me to move between different areas of my research, and our exchange encompassed trauma psychology, Jungian analysis, anthropology, evolution and personal experience

The World of Trauma – on Circle of Insight Podcast

A vibrant exchange about the creation of emotional trauma, and the fear-laden and shame-filled inner world which form around it.

Being Human Podcast

Discussion of how to define trauma, the trade-offs that come into play in the wake of traumatising events (and their roots in evolution), the difference between healing and curing trauma.

The Death Mother as Nature’s Shadow: Fostering compassion and healing through an evolutionary consciousness

Western culture tends to view maternal ambivalence and hostility as unnatural. Evolutionary research challenges this view. The situations faced by ancestral mothers sometimes made abandoning a child inevitable. Recognising this fosters compassion for today’s struggling mothers, as well as greater understanding of the trauma carried by their children.

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

The Death Mother is best understood when approached with compassionate curiosity and from a variety of perspectives. Here she is explored through Jungian, psychodynamic, evolutionary and anthropological lenses. The aim is to help both mothers who are living this damaging energy, and those who grow up damaged through encounters with this energy.

Being Animal

I knew that I was an animal. I had studied ecology and understood that I was part of the web of life. I had studied evolution and understood the processes that had forged humankind. But my understanding came from books, and it was not until I lived in Tanzania that it became real to my own body and mind.