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The Monstrous Mother​
Motherhood, Loss and the Psychological Haunting of the Absent
What happens when motherhood is haunted by an absence that does not simply disappear?
There are experiences for which ordinary language offers remarkably little space.
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A loss can be real without becoming visible.
A relationship can exist without becoming socially recognisable.
A mother can continue to experience a presence that the outside world has already classified as absence.
The Gothic has long known how to speak about such contradictions.
It gives absence a body.
It gives memory a ghost.
It gives grief a monster.
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When Motherhood Becomes a Gothic Experience
My chapter, “The Monstrous Mother: A Personal Journey Through Motherhood, Loss, and the Psychological Haunting Under the Gothic-Jungian Lens,” explores what happens when experiences of motherhood, loss and memory exceed the narratives available to contain them.
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Rather than treating the monstrous mother simply as a cultural figure — the bad mother, the unnatural mother, the dangerous mother — the essay approaches monstrosity as a symbolic disturbance.
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What has been excluded returns.
What cannot be integrated becomes haunting.
What cannot be spoken may appear through images, stories and dreams.
The monster, in this sense, is not necessarily the opposite of the mother.
Sometimes the monster is what the maternal experience has been unable to contain.
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From Personal Experience to Cultural Question
The essay begins from lived experience, but it does not remain autobiography.
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Motherhood, loss and grief become the starting point for a wider investigation into the symbolic languages through which human beings attempt to give form to experiences that resist ordinary explanation.
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This is where literature and horror become more than representations of psychological experience.
They become ways of thinking.
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Through Gothic narratives, the invisible can become visible. Contradictory feelings can coexist. Absence can take form. The apparently irrational can become meaningful without having to be reduced to a simple explanation.
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The Book
Horror and Mother/hoods in Global Cultural Imaginaries
Horror and Mother/hoods in Global Cultural Imaginaries: Representations Across Literature, Film, Television, and Art explores the intersections between motherhood, monstrosity and horror across different cultural forms.
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Published by Demeter Press in 2026, the collection brings together interdisciplinary approaches to maternal subjectivities, reproductive experience, trauma, loss, monstrosity and the cultural imagination.
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"An intriguing and intimate yet academically grounded personal account."
Anonymous Peer Reviewer
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My contribution
“The Monstrous Mother: A Personal Journey Through Motherhood, Loss, and the Psychological Haunting Under the Gothic-Jungian Lens.”
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My chapter brings personal experience into conversation with Gothic studies, Jungian thought, grief and symbolic imagination, asking how cultural narratives can give form to experiences of motherhood and loss that remain difficult to articulate.
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Explore the book and publication →
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The Monstrous and the Maternal
The figure of the monstrous mother has a long cultural history:
She may devour.
She may threaten.
She may fail to nurture.
She may refuse the role assigned to her.
She may become frightening precisely because she reveals something that the idealised image of motherhood cannot accommodate.
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But reducing these figures to a binary between good mother and monstrous mother leaves something important unexplored.
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What if monstrosity is not simply a quality possessed by the mother?
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What if it emerges from the structures through which motherhood is contained, idealised, feared and controlled?
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This question has become central to my continuing research into the Great Mother.
Toward the Great Mother
In Jungian and mythological traditions, the Great Mother is not simply the benevolent mother.
She contains opposing possibilities.
She nourishes and devours.
She gives life and returns life to the earth.
She shelters and confines.
She represents the generative and sustaining principle, but also the forces that can engulf differentiation.
My current research is developing these tensions through three related constellations:
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The Devouring Mother
The maternal force that absorbs rather than releases; that preserves by preventing separation; that turns containment into engulfment.
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The Terrible Mother
The maternal figure encountered through fear, destruction, death, punishment or the collapse of the protective container.
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The Dark Feminine
The dimension of feminine experience that cannot be reduced to maternal goodness, social acceptability or the demand to remain nurturing, legible and contained.
These are not fixed types of women.
They are symbolic constellations through which different cultural experiences can become visible.
The work begins precisely where the categories become unstable.
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The Mother Contains the Monster
One of the questions emerging from this research is deceptively simple:
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What if the mother does not merely confront the monster, but contains it?
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A protective structure can also conceal what it cannot integrate.
A system designed to sustain life can become a place in which something frightening is incubated.
This does not mean that motherhood itself produces monstrosity. It means that cultural structures surrounding motherhood may determine which experiences can be expressed, which must remain hidden, and which eventually return in monstrous form.
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The Gothic is particularly powerful here because it refuses to keep these contradictions neatly separated.
Exploratory Literature
This is also where my idea of Explorative Literature emerges.
I am interested in literary and cultural works not only as objects to interpret, but as spaces in which difficult human experiences can be explored.
A novel, film, myth or horror narrative may allow us to approach an experience before we possess the language to explain it directly.
Reading therefore becomes an encounter; not a diagnosis, a lesson or a ready-made interpretation.
Exploratory Literature is a way of staying with the question long enough for another form of understanding to emerge.
Beyond the Monstrous Mother
This essay is one point of entry into a larger investigation.
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I am interested in the questions that appear when motherhood can no longer be understood through the familiar opposition between nurturing and monstrous, presence and absence, life and death.
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The investigation continues through mythology, literature, horror, dreams and contemporary culture.
Because sometimes the question is not: What is the monster? but: What has had to become monstrous in order to become visible?
Continue the Descent
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The Great Mother
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The Devouring Mother
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The Terrible Mother
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The Dark Feminine
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Motherhood and the Gothic
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Grief and symbolic imagination
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Horror and maternal experience
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Explorative Literature
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Enter the Library →
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