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The Haunted Mother
Horror and Mother/hoods in a Global Cultural Imaginaries is a collective work exploring motherhood, monstrosity, grief, horror, and the maternal imagination across cultures, media, and symbolic forms.
My contribution to this volume explores the psychological haunting that emerges when motherhood becomes entangled with loss, absence, and unresolved grief.
Motherhood is often imagined as life-giving, nurturing, and complete. But some experiences fracture that image:
Miscarriages.
Ectopic pregnancies.
Stillbirth.
Infertility.
The haunting presence of lives that never fully arrived.
These experiences do not disappear once the body survives them: they linger, in dreams, in memory, in the body itself.
The Monstrous Mother and Maternal Haunting
In this essay, I explore how maternal loss can transform motherhood into a haunted psychological space.
Through Gothic symbolism and Jungian psychology, I examine the figure of the Monstrous Mother not as a simple horror trope, but as an archetypal expression of grief, fragmentation, and the tension between creation and destruction.
This work moves through the space between the idealised image of motherhood and the lived reality of maternal ambivalence, pain, fear, and loss, but also between what society expects women to embody and what many silently carry within themselves.
What emerges is not simply personal grief, but a confrontation with the darker dimensions of the maternal psyche and the cultural structures that often silence it.
Why This Matters
Some forms of grief remain socially invisible.
There are losses that receive no ritual, no language, and no place within collective narratives of motherhood.
Women are often expected to continue functioning as though nothing irreversible has occurred. But the psyche does not work that way; what cannot be articulated often returns indirectly through haunting, repetition, fragmentation and through the body itself.
This work gives symbolic form to experiences that many women endure in silence.
This Book as an Entry Point
If you have experienced forms of grief that feel difficult to explain, if motherhood has confronted you with emotions that do not fit idealised narratives, or if you are trying to understand the psychological complexity of maternal experience beyond simplistic cultural expectations, this work offers a place to begin.
Not with resolution.
But with recognition.
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Pre-order your copy now
Horror and Mother/hoods in a Global Cultural Imaginaries brings together academic, creative, and interdisciplinary explorations of motherhood, horror, monstrosity, grief, and symbolic transformation.
My contribution, The Monstrous Mother: A Personal Journey Through Motherhood, Loss, and the Psychological Haunting Under the Gothic-Jungian Lens, combines personal narrative, Gothic symbolism, and Jungian psychology to explore the haunting dimensions of maternal grief and loss.
When you pre-order, you will also receive:
Holding the Invisible: A Guided Descent into Maternal Haunting
A reflective companion guide designed to help you move from reading into articulation.
Through carefully structured reflections and writing prompts, this guide will help you:
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Explore forms of grief that may never have been fully acknowledged
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Recognise how loss can remain stored symbolically within the body and psyche
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Give language to experiences that often remain unnamed or socially silenced
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Reflect on the tension between motherhood, identity, absence, and expectation
This is not an academic supplement; it is a space for symbolic reflection, articulation, and inner observation.
Because some forms of grief do not disappear simply because the world does not know how to hold them.
Pre-order your copy and receive the companion guide