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168 / The Extended Familywas particularly germane. Leja has pointed out that both Freudian and Jungiantheories enjoyed prestige during the war years, but that women analysts,in particular those associated with the New York–based Analytical PsychologyClub, were drawn to the writings of Karl Jung because “the attention given to‘the female’ by Jung—his emphasis on the role of the mother in the Oedipuscomplex, the prominence given to female archetypes, his notion of an ‘anima’(the female component in the male unconscious)—coincided with ongoingsocial and ideological changes in the U.S. regarding women.” 13 In Jung’s essay“The Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” published in Englishby the Analytical Psychology Club of New York in the spring of 1943, 14 he describesthe mother as at once human and necessarily archetypal:Why risk saying too much . . . about that human being who was our mother, the accidentalcarrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and allmankind . . . [A] sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden ofmeaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail andfallible human being . . . Nor should we hesitate for one moment to relieve the humanmother of this appalling burden, for our own sakes as well as hers. It is just thismassive weight of meaning that ties us to the mother and chains her to her child, tothe physical and mental detriment of both. A mother-complex is not got rid of byblindly reducing the mother to human proportions. 15Neel painted Subconscious the year before this text was published in English,but it can be seen nonetheless as a response to the Jungian ideas thatwere in the air. The social realism of the Spanish Harlem portraits has been replacedby surrealist biomorphism, and the child-doll of Symbols (Doll and Apple)metamorphosed into an armless, subhuman, maternal automaton with atumorlike child appendage, an externalized fetus. This grotesque image of the“mother’s burden” con„ates the psychological and the physical toll of childrearing,presenting the interpyschic con„ict in terms parallel to Dali’s The ArchitectonicAngelus of Millet, exhibited at MoMA the previous year (1933, ƒg.172). Because until the age of two the infant’s helplessness requires that themother carry it constantly, Neel pictures motherhood as an abnormal extensionof pregnancy, distorting the “natural” form of both mother and child tocreate a monstrous hybrid.Although there is no evidence that she read Jung’s work at this time, shemay have become acquainted with his theories through her friendship withthe painter John Graham, whom she met in 1939, and who gave her a copy ofhis in„uential book The System and Dialectics of Art (1937). A strange, pedantictext structured in question-and-answer format, System attempts a comprehensiveanalysis of the nature of art and of the creative act. For Graham the