In Murdock’s book, separation from the feminine comes in two flavors: rejection of the mother or rejection by the mother. What does that say about mothers and is it really true? Is this something that has been universally true though out the ages? Maybe a third way should be considered too – the death of the mother. That would have been far more common across the ages. Think of the fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White – the heroine was forced to separate from the mother by death and then the battle with the evil stepmother provided another means or focus of fighting the feminine.
In The Secret of Roan Inish (one of my favorite movies) the young heroine loses her mother when she is three or four. A few years later while visiting the grandparents, she has a dream of her mother holding the new baby and singing a soft lullaby in the quiet golden dark of a room lit only by a fire. She awakens from the dream, looks directly at the camera, and whispers, “Mother.”