“A mother is dying. She has a husband and two sons, around nine to eleven years old. She is lying on the ground. Someone is sitting beside her head. Her body is very cold. What stands out most is the way her feet are crossed—her right foot resting over the left. She wants to leave this earth. She wants to die. She is too tired to go on living like that. She has given everything to her husband and to her sons. The men in her life have completely drained her energy. She has sacrificed herself, her life, and now she wants freedom.”

This image did not come as an idea. It came as a knowing. A quiet, heavy knowing that many women—and many men, though often less consciously—carry within themselves. The mother in this dream is not only a personal figure. She is an archetypal position. She is Eros itself: the principle of connection, emotional holding, psychic nourishment, and relational life.

The woman in the dream is not dramatic. She is not protesting. She is not accusing. She is simply exhausted. Her exhaustion is not situational; it is historical.

I have seen this mother in waking life. She sits across from a man she loves and tries—carefully, tactfully—to explain what hurts. She chooses her words with care, not because she doubts her truth, but because she already knows how fragile his listening is. She carries the emotional atmosphere of the conversation before it even begins.

She explains what happened. How it affected her. What it slowly took from her. He does not necessarily deny the facts. What he denies is the weight of their impact. He explains himself. He defends his intentions. He retreats into justification. The underlying message, often unspoken but clearly felt, is simple: I did not do anything wrong.

So she adapts. She softens. She explains again. She doubts her perception. She regulates not only her own emotions, but his. She holds the relationship together by holding herself back.

This is where the mother begins to die.

Not suddenly. Not visibly. But cell by cell, affect by affect.

Motherhood, femininity, and sacrificial mothering are not identical. The sacrificial mother is not simply the nurturing mother; she is the one who gives beyond reciprocity, who absorbs emotional chaos, dependency, suffering, and unworked psychic material in order to preserve continuity—of family, of relationship, of culture itself. Over time, she becomes the psychic infrastructure upon which others rely. As Marie-Louise von Franz noted in her writings on individuation, what is not consciously carried by one side of the psyche is unconsciously borne by another. In historical terms, women have carried not only children, but the uninitiated inner lives of men.

What this dream shows is not the death of motherhood, nor the rejection of care, nor hostility toward men. It shows the collapse of a one-sided Eros, an Eros that has been conscripted into endless service without reciprocity. Jung reminds us that where life is no longer lived authentically, it turns into symptom. What we are witnessing today—in relationships, in intimacy, in women’s growing refusal to enter certain relational forms—is not rebellion. It is withdrawal.

A withdrawal of libido.

A withdrawal of psychic warmth.

A withdrawal of life force from an arrangement that has become unsustainable.

The dream mother has fulfilled this role completely. She has given everything. What is decisive is the emotional tone of her withdrawal. There is no rage, no accusation, no desire to punish. She does not demand recognition or reform. She simply no longer wishes to live in this form. Jung consistently emphasized that death in dreams rarely signifies literal destruction; it signifies the withdrawal of libido from a form that has exhausted its meaning. What dies is no longer capable of sustaining life.

This distinction matters greatly in the current cultural moment. Much contemporary discourse around gender, relationships, and motherhood is framed in terms of blame or ideology. The dream offers something far more unsettling: exhaustion without hatred. The mother does not reject men; she rejects a psychic economy that has required her self-erasure. Her desire for death is not nihilistic. It is teleological. It marks the end of a historical arrangement rather than a personal collapse.

She has carried what others have not learned to carry themselves. She has absorbed what was never reflected back. She has been asked, implicitly and explicitly, to function as the emotional mother not only to children, but to adult men.

This is where Marie-Louise von Franz’s description of the puer aeternus becomes painfully relevant. The eternal boy is not necessarily cruel or malicious. He may be sensitive, intelligent, even idealistic. But he resists weight. He avoids responsibility for his inner life. He externalizes the task of emotional containment onto the woman. He unconsciously demands mothering while desiring partnership. The masculine figures in the dream have not undergone full psychic initiation. They remain dependent on the maternal field for emotional regulation, meaning, and containment.

Jung understood individuation as a process that demands suffering, confrontation with inner darkness, and the assumption of responsibility for one’s own psychic life. When this process is deferred or avoided, dependency does not disappear; it is displaced. The feminine becomes the unconscious bearer of what the masculine has not integrated. Hillman later sharpened this insight by emphasizing that modern relationships often collapse under the weight of psychological expectations once carried by religion, ritual, and myth. The partner—often the woman—becomes analyst, mother, priestess, and emotional container all at once.

And women, time and again, are pushed into accepting this role of carrying everything they can for men—not because they want to, but because the relational field subtly requires it. The price of refusing is often loneliness, conflict, or the collapse of the relationship itself.

So the mother accepts the burden. Until she cannot.

Across many cultures today, this archetypal withdrawal appears as collective symptoms. Women choose singleness in growing numbers. Birth rates decline. Motherhood is postponed or refused. Relationships are approached with skepticism or avoided altogether. These phenomena are often interpreted sociologically or politically, yet from a Jungian perspective they indicate a libidinal withdrawal from an exhausted archetypal form. Women are not rejecting intimacy, Eros, or continuity as such. They are rejecting non-reciprocal psychic arrangements in which care flows in only one direction.

This dream is not only about women. The dying mother also lives within men—within the part of the psyche that knows how to relate, to feel, to bind, to stay present. But in the collective arrangement as it currently stands, this function is overwhelmingly projected onto women and demanded from them.

The mother in the dream does not want to die because she hates life. She wants to die because she wants a different form of life, and this one offers no path toward it. She does not see transformation ahead; she sees repetition. It is therefore essential to clarify what this dream does not say. It does not announce the end of care, love, or relationship. Nor does it proclaim the triumph of autonomy over attachment. It announces the end of patriarchal mothering: the unconscious expectation that women will compensate for masculine underdevelopment through sacrifice. This is not a celebratory moment. Archetypal deaths are never comfortable. When the sacrificial mother withdraws, something collapses not only for men, but for the entire psychic order that depended on her.

The dream leaves unanswered the most unsettling question of all: what becomes of the masculine when the feminine no longer carries its inner life? Analytical psychology cannot answer this in advance. It can only insist that individuation cannot be outsourced indefinitely without psychic consequence.

The position of the dreamer is therefore crucial. She is not the dying mother. She stands beside another woman near the mother’s head. She is neither savior nor mourner nor judge. She is witness. This position corresponds to the task Jung assigned to consciousness at moments of archetypal transition: to see clearly, to resist identification, and to hold the tension without premature resolution. 

The crossed feet of the dying mother suggest finality. The body has already decided what consciousness is only beginning to understand. A form of femininity that sustained civilization through sacrifice has reached its limit. Its withdrawal leaves a void—psychological, relational, and cultural. Whether that void becomes destructive or transformative depends not on women alone, but on whether the collective, and particularly the masculine, can assume responsibility for psychic depth, emotional labor, and inner work.

The dream does not yet show what replaces this dying mother. It does not offer a new image of relationship. It simply shows what can no longer continue. The mother lies on the earth. She withdraws her warmth. She lets go. And perhaps this is exactly where the collective now stands: A feminine principle that refuses endless sacrifice; an Eros that no longer agrees to disappear. A mother—within women, within men, within the culture itself—who says, without accusation and without drama:

I cannot live like this anymore.

What comes next remains unknown. But the refusal itself is already a psychic event. And it deserves to be taken seriously—not as ideology, not as social trend, but as a profound archetypal shift unfolding before our eyes.

Didem Çivici – Copyright ©2026
(Jungian Psychoanalyst- C.G. Jung Institut, Zürich)