S2 Ep69. The Terrible Great Mother. The Spiritual Crisis of our Time. Part 12

Nature, besides being benevolent, is also death-threatening and can appear malevolent. Survival demands aggression. Destructiveness and selfishness are vital parts of our animal and therefore human psyche. Our savagery is infamous. Thus, we have the opposites of nature, the good and the terrible, within ourselves. These opposites in our experience of nature, the two faces of the Great Mother, the good and the terrible, are paralleled very closely by the psychoanalytic school of Melanie Klein which postulates that all human infants begin life in a paranoid schizoid state in which the good and bad breast alternate as fundamental structuring experiences of the infant psyche. This duality is resolved in the ‘depressive position’ which would find its equivalent in the history of the species as the birth of civilization. Freud also postulated that life and civilization emerged and developed out of two polar forces – love and hate.