In the Name of the Mother

Why isn't God a Mother? Lisa M. Cataldo argues that we resist the Mother God image because to fully engage 'Her' requires us to encounter our earliest experiences of absolute dependence. To meet the Mother God is to meet dissociated aspects of ourselves - namely, those parts which contain envy, destructiveness, and the fear of annihilation. Using illustrations from traditional and feminist theology, Cataldo exposes the way in which women and mothers have been positioned in the realm of 'theological problem'. The work traces the genesis of religious experience to the earliest relationship with mother, finding in foundational psychoanalytic texts traces of the 'numinous mother'. Cataldo shows that the earliest experience with mother links existentially and psychologically with a terror of dependence, annihilation, and 'falling forever' and the dissociation of what Winnicott calls the 'female element' in both women and men. The book finally considers ways in which the attachment to a God who is primarily Father-Creator might serve to 'hide' the Mother God.