The most universal symbol for the death/rebirth process is probably the butterfly. As this creature dies to being a caterpillar, it is reborn as a butterfly. Another symbol of this process is the snake, which sheds its skin every year and grows a new one to fit its bigger body. For indigenous people, the cycle of spring-summer-fall-winter was the wheel of life, constantly dying and rebirthing itself. All of these symbols and cycles found their spiritual home in the Great Mother traditions, for the metaphor of birth, menstrual cycles, and the nurturing capacities of women were the natural ways to connect the human experience to Nature.

The Great Mother religions were replaced by the Sky-God traditions beginning in earnest with ancient Greece. At first, the pantheon of gods and goddesses achieved a balance between the Great Mother religions and the emerging Sky-God tradition, which brought to humankind the psychological template for the individuation process through the archetypal journey of the hero. The Great Mother traditions honored and continued to foster embeddedness with nature that disallowed the evolution of the separate ego-self. The Sky-God traditions provided a way for the ego to escape that embeddedness and attain selfhood. The problem, however, is that the evolution of consciousness must follow a "transcend and include" protocol for it to be successful. Humankind needed to find a way to continue to honor the Great Mother, while at the same time push forward into full development of the ego-self. Ancient Greece was able to mostly manage that; later Rome was not. Even later, with the Holy Roman Empire, the Great Mother tradition was suppressed.

At a personal level, this is equivalent to repressing one's own body, one's own human nature. We all start out, as Freud said, as "bodyego." We are embedded with nature, the physical world. Our personal evolution then goes through a series of developmental stages until, by the time we are 12 years old or so, we claim full ego status. Our cognitive abilities, our brains, and our sense of self have reached a mostly adult level. We can reason in the abstract; we can take the role of another; we can form and work with hierarchies, possibilities, and hypotheses. We have a secure sense of our own identities. But this evolutionary scheme cannot happen if we have denied and repressed our bodies. If we have done that, we end up in diagnosable pathologies.

This presents the intriguing, and somewhat frightening, conclusion that Western civilization may be operating from a pathological framework, a framework that has been developing since the Great Mother traditions were suppressed rather than transcended and included. If that is the case, what might those pathologies be?

Developmental psychology tells us that during the early formation of the ego there are three major stages: pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational thinking. Pre-op is roughly equivalent to preschool; con-op to grade school; form-op to the teens years and beyond. If things go wrong in the pre-op stage (where the child moves out of her embeddedness with nature and establishes a mental-ego), the resultant pathologies are in the borderline/narcissistic categories. If things go wrong at the con-op stage, the resultant pathologies are "script" or role pathologies. If things go wrong at the form-op stage, then a host of psychoneuroses can occur. So, if Western society, by suppressing the Great Mother traditions, is still saddled with the pathology that attends to that developmental stage, we ought to have some borderline/narcissistic problems that are engrained in society's gameplan.

The major feature of borderline and narcissism is a weak boundary system. In other words, the distinction between emotional-me and emotional-other is not well defined. It just so happens that this state or condition of weak boundaries is the primary definition of codependency. Researchers that work in the field of recovery claim that up to 85% of the people in Western society do the business of life from a codependent mindset. If that claim is true, then what is the remedy? Codependent recovery is the current remedy, and there are many folks gaining quality recovery in programs such as Alanon, Coda, and the various Adult Children of Dysfunctional Family groups. One can hope that once there are enough recovered codependents in society, critical mass will be achieved and society itself will shift to a more healthy set of contracts among its citizens.

On the other hand, we will still be left with the fact that the Great Mother traditions, which are the societal and probably the spiritual counterpart to an individual's developmental process, must be taken into account. Said differently, Nature must be included-not deified, as the Romantics have done, because that would be regressive. Included means that we find a way, as a society, to honor the Earth and accept that we are all, first and foremost, children of the Earth.

Bruce Bibee, MTP, is a counselor in private practice. He is also the owner/instructor of the Kung-Fu San Soo Center.