Lindsay Clancy has brought renewed attention to the horror of infanticide: babies and children dying at the hands of their mother. Infanticide has taken place for millennia, most often due to social pressures or lack of the resources needed to raise a child. Human collectives around the world remain ill-equipped to protect our youngest by providing support to mothers in material or emotional distress.
Today’s guest is clinical psychologist Dr. Brooke Laufer, author of Uncovering the Act of Maternal Infanticide from a Psychological, Political, and Jungian Perspective. Brooke joins us to discuss infanticide, maternal psychosis, and the archetype of the death mother, long portrayed in myth. The Hindu goddess Kali births and nourishes her children — and also devours them. In Greek myth Medea kills her children after her husband’s abandonment and betrayal. The Black Madonna offers a potentially healing combination of the maternal and the fierce.
The debate raging around Lindsay Clancy’s case asks us not to take sides but to integrate the dark realities of motherhood instead of splitting those off and only acknowledging an idealized version of the maternal. Although motherhood is often portrayed as joyful and fulfilling, we deny its dark side at our peril. Our task is to recognize motherhood light and dark as a prerequisite to providing meaningful measures aimed at ameliorating childhood neglect and abuse.
“The energy of the Death Mother archetype is more than the drive to kill a child, it is a dynamic of energies, vexing to the intellect, almost impossible to contain in a description. The Death Mother archetype is a fury of the betrayed, a fear of the entrapped, a movement of liberation, and a blind white rage of action. It is the catalyzing of a movement from the mundane to the mysterium tremendum in the activation of the sacred, deadly force of the Great Mother that transcends human life. Specifically, these archetypal energies arise in a mother whose children are still close to her womb and who has experienced a deep constitutional wrong that has injured her integrity as a mother to such a degree that a wire is tripped and an electricity released. We know from neuroscience that the trip wire of a trauma reaction bypasses the executive, decision-making functions of the brain. Moreover, in the frame of archetypal and Jungian psychology, the quality of this electrical surge that floods the maternal psyche in reaction to trauma is that of the Death Mother archetype. (Brooke Laufer, Uncovering the Act of Maternal Infanticide from a Psychological, Political, and Jungian Perspective, pp.32-33).
Our Guest – Brooke Laufer, Ph.D
Dr. Brooke Laufer is the author of Uncovering the Act of Maternal Infanticide from a Psychological, Political, and Jungian Perspective. She is an independent scholar, writer, and clinician with a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She has analytic training and a deep interest in motherhood, perinatal mood disorders, and infanticide. She serves as an expert witness specializing in cases of infanticide and maternal filicide.
Here’s the Dream We Analyze
I’m at a place with a lot of people and a tyrant. An older man keeps clinging to me and I don’t necessarily mind except I think it will get us into trouble. The tyrant sees us and decides we have to die. He grabs us and throws us into a room and I realize he will kill us. I’m sad but don’t feel there’s any way out. A man comes over carrying a phone and gives it to me. It’s my mom with a whole bunch of friends in the background. She yells, “they’re going to kill you aren’t they?” And I say yes and start to cry. It’s the first time I feel emotion around it. Then the man takes back the phone and I think, they should get on with it. I think it will be poison and that I’ll just go to sleep, but it seems they’re taking forever to get to me. The Guess Who song “No Time” is playing in my head.
Follow Up The Episode
- Subscribe to Brooke’s Substack.
- Brooke Laufer, “Beyond Criminal Intent: Infant-Directed Violence as a Symptom of Postpartum Psychosis”, Frontiers in Psychiatry, August 2026.
- Brooke Laufer & Natalie Mun, “‘It shows you your fears’: a qualitative analysis and psychoanalytic interpretation of the psychotic content of postpartum psychosis”, Psychosis, v.17, no.3, 2025.
- Brooke Laufer, “Medea as the Modern Mother: Infanticide, Motherhood, and Transmutation”, Psychological Perspectives, December 2021.
- Brooke Laufer, Uncovering the Act of Maternal Infanticide from a Psychological, Political, and Jungian Perspective.
- Postpartum Support International Information on Postpartum Psychosis: https://postpartum.net/get-help/postpartum-psychosis-help/
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