"The Small Mother Complex. A Jungian reflection on the cultural complex of Femininity" - Workshop

The Hong Kong Institute of Analytical Psychology is privileged to invite Dr. Marta Tibaldi,

the IAAP liaison person  for the Hong Kong Developing Group, to visit us again.

Marta is a psychologist, a psychotherapist  with a specialization in Analytical Psychology.

She is a training analyst and supervisor for the Italian Association for Analytical Psychology (AIPA) and a registered training analyst at C.G. Jung Institute at Zurich.

On 28th March 2015, Marta will present a workshop on the following topic:

The Small Mother Complex. A Jungian reflection on the cultural complex of Femininity

One day workshop with practice of dreamwork analysis

In this workshop Dr. Marta Tibaldi will reflect on the notion of “cultural complex” in general
and on some aspects of the Italian complex of “feminine” and “femininity” in particular, considering how they affect either the inner relationships between the male and female psychic principles or the relationships between women and men.

Joseph Henderson of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco used the term “cultural complex” for the first time on December 3, 1947 in an unpublished letter to C.G. Jung and Thomas Singer recently put Jung’s original complex theory and Henderson’s work on the cultural unconscious together, extending Jung’s analytical psychology to the relation to the cultural aspects of the psyche.

As for personal complexes, "cultural complexes can also possess the psyche and soma of an individual or a group, causing them to think and feel in ways that might be quite different from what they think they should feel or think” (see T. Singer with C. Kaplinsky, 2010, “Cultural Complexes in Analysis”, In Jungian Psychoanalysis: Working in the Spirit of C.G. Jung, edited by Murray Stein, pp. 22-37. Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago).

The notion of “femininity” is characterized by strong cultural aspects and therefore tends to act as a cultural complex both in women and in men.
The Mediterranean Great Mother has always been considered an image of great power and influence on the Italian psyche.
Marta Tibaldi’s provocative thesis is that the Mediterranean Great Mother Complex has
turned now into a Small Mother Complex, that is in a devalued image of femininity that leads to images of “small men” and “small women”, “small feminine” in both genders, to the detriment of the individual and the collective experience of the desire.
Considering the poor narratives that shape Italian women’s and men’s relationships trapped in the Small Mother complex, spontaneous unconscious imagery and its autonomous narratives represent a priceless resource.
If we can become aware of the personal and cultural narratives acting inside ourselves, we can become active narrators of different stories.
A reflection on Shirley See Yan Ma’s book “Footbinding”, just translated in Italian and forwarded by Marta Tibaldi, will be the starting point to focus also some aspects of the Chinese cultural complex of femininity.

In the second part of the workshop, the participants could provide one short dream or image each in which there are dynamics between feminine and masculine, or female images.
Marta will work in the audience’s material.
The analysis of dreams/images brought by the audience will add a practical and a direct experience of some unconscious aspects of the Western and Eastern cultural complex of
femininity.

This activity is co-sponsored by the Methodist Centre

Date: 28th March 2015, 9:30 AM - 4:30PM

Marta Tibaldi, Professional Profile and Publications