This study explores the developmental trauma presented in the mythology of Dionysus to elucidate the dynamics of Bion's model of the container-contained relationship in the development of mind as it relates to working with trauma survivors in psychotherapy. Five aspects of the mother are identified and engaged from psychoanalytic and post-Jungian perspectives using an archetypal approach and hermeneutic method. The five mothers identified are Hera, Persephone, Semele, Zeus, and the mother as a group.

Hera is found to reveal the actions of the psychotic part of the personality and attacks on linking as laid out in Wilfred Bion's theory of the development of mind, as well as the intersections between Bion's model and Heinz Kohut's work on narcissism and selfobject functions. Persephone and Semele demonstrate the dynamics of André Green's Dead Mother Complex and the failures in the development of alpha function that occur as an adaptive response to such care giving.

In the figure of Zeus as the male womb and the relationship between Zeus and Semele, the study turns its attention from fragmentation and failures in the developmental milieu to the dynamics which support the development of alpha function and a capacity for thinking. By following the images of the mother as a group, the study concludes by noting how the archetype of the mother as it is held by the group actually moves the developing psyche into archetypal constellations of the container-contained relationship that transcend the mother archetype.

Based on the findings in its exploration of the mother as a group, the study concludes with a consideration of initiatory experiences and their capacity to deliver one into one's own mind. The transformations that occur in initiatory experiences are found to provide clinical psychology with a model for working through the impact of trauma throughout the life span, supporting the ongoing development of alpha function in individuals and the group as aspects of both the container and contained.