[2] Jung too was absorbed in his writings by the concept of the archaic mother,[3] and his followers have warned of the danger of that imago being re-activated in the transference by the female therapist.
[5] Feminist analysts like Luce Irigaray have subsequently attempted to reclaim the archaic mother as an empowering force for female identity.
Sceptics, however, have accepted Julia Kristeva's warning about the Utopian, indeed narcissistic perils of attempting to circumvent society, and the cultural sphere, by regressing to a phantasisised merger with the archaic, undifferentiated mother.
[6] Kristeva also considered the Jungian approach as a "dead end with its archetypal configurations of libidinal substance taken out of the realm of sexuality and placed in bondage to the archaic mother".
[8] She addresses the archaic mother as the major subjectivising agency for the infant in a relations that she defines as matrixial, where psychic differentiation coincides with co-emergence.