The Maternal Lineage

Identification, Desire and Transgenerational Issues

Paola Mariotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415681643
• eBook ISBN: 9781135137151
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why do women want to have children? How does one 'learn' to be a mother? Does having babies have anything to do with sex?

At a time when mothers are bombarded by prescriptive and contradicting advice on how to behave with their children, The Maternal Lineage highlights various psychological aspects of the mothering experience.

International contributors provide clinical examples of frequent and challenging situations that have received scarce attention in psychoanalysis, such as issues of neglect and psychical abuse. The transgenerational repetition from mother to daughter of distressing mothering patterns is evident throughout the book, and may seem inevitable. However, clinical examples and theoretical research indicate that, when the support of partner and friends is not enough, the cycle can be brought to an end if the mother receives psychoanalytic-informed professional help.

The Maternal Lineage is divided into four parts:

• An Introduction including a review of the literature focusing on the mother-daughter relationship
• Pregnancy and very early issues
• Subfertility and its effects on a woman's psyche
• The psychological aspects of major mothering problems: miscarriages, post-natal depression, adolescent motherhood.

This timely book will be of value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and health professionals – obstetricians, psychiatrists, midwives and social workers.

PART ONE

Mothering in body and mind

Paola Mariotti

Approaching the various aspects of maternality explored in the first part of this book requires some considerations of female development in its specificity. As we have seen, Freud (1933) did not seem confident and satisfied with his own conclusions, which he described as ‘certainly incomplete and fragmentary’ (p. 135). However, some of his followers in the first half of the twentieth century had no hesitation in postulating a connection between female development, masochism and passivity:

In the reproductive functions proper – menstruation, defloration, pregnancy and parturition – woman is biologically doomed to suffer. Nature seems to have no hesitation in administering to her strong doses of pain, and she can do nothing but submit passively to the regimen prescribed.

(Bonaparte 1935: 326–327)

Helene Deutsch (1945), in her two-volume The Psychology of Women, embraced Freud’s theories: the importance of penis envy in the little girl’s early development, masochism as a major element in women’s erotic pleasure, the role of passivity all concord with Freud’s views. But in the section on motherhood, especially in her clinical material, a more nuanced understanding emerges – for instance, the desire for a child is not seen as a replacement for the penis. In Deutsch a woman comes into her own with motherhood, and to motherhood her sexuality is submitted.

In discussing the early development of maternal feelings in the little girl, Judith Kestenberg (1956) proposed a sophisticated connection between the young child’s discovery of undefined vaginal (and genital) sensations, and her desire for a baby (or attachment to a doll). She suggested that early undischarged and confusing vaginal excitations were the basic source of the girl’s wish for a child:

The most powerful source of the girl’s maternal interest, however, is the projection of the vaginal sensations upon the baby, and the equation of the inside of the body with the baby. … The baby doll which can be carried around everywhere and can be held close to the body during sleep, substitutes for the lack of organ entity and organ constancy inherent in early vaginal tensions.

(Kestenberg 1956: 462)

Benedek studied women’s sexuality and reproductive cycle, including infertility (Benedek et al. 1953) and the menopause (Benedek 1950), from the point of view of drive theory, aiming also to support her psychoanalytic observations with the findings of biology (Benedek 1960). In ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’ (Benedek 1959), as I shall show later, she discussed the effect on the parents’ psychic life of having and raising children.

In the 1960s the interest in sociological aspects of gender influenced the thinking of American psychoanalysts such as Dinnerstein (1976) and Chodorow (1978), while preparing the ground for the extensive work of gender studies theorists who have been active in recent decades. Various interrelated social factors have contributed to the interest in female development which has taken place in the last 30 or 40 years. The feminist movement, the availability of contraception, the improvement in quality of life with the extension of education for girls, have allowed women to bring to the fore issues of specific interest to the female gender, in psychoanalysis as in other areas. It is important to notice that these studies reveal aspects of women’s life – such as the mother–daughter relationship – that until recently had not registered their importance in psychoanalysis.¹ There have been numerous North American contributions to the study of maternality from psychoanalysts sensitive to the work of gender theorists, often within the framework of intersubjective and relational psychoanalysis (see, for instance, Benjamin’s work). It is beyond the scope of this book to do justice to these contributions.

In France close attention to Freud’s theories of sexuality led to several important studies of maternal sexuality (Braunschweig and Fain 1975; Laplanche 1997; Cournut-Janin 1998), while the concept of primary homosexuality (Denis 1982; Kestemberg 1984) designated the early mother and infant erotic experience and contributed to a clarification of the structuring function of sexuality on the young person’s psychic life. In the British Society, Dinora Pines (1982) and Joan Raphael-Leff (1991, 2001, 2003) have been pioneers in exploring psychoanalytically events specifically relevant to the reproductive life of women.

Winnicott was perhaps the first to focus on a woman’s state of mind in the perinatal period, with his classic paper on ‘Primary Maternal Preoccupation’, written in 1958 and reprinted here (Chapter 1). He understood this state of ‘preoccupation’ to be specific to the experience of being a mother, and that it ‘would be an illness were it not for the fact of the pregnancy’. The young mother experiences a ‘heightened sensitivity’, which is essential to enable her to provide her child with the responsiveness she or he needs, so that the infant can experience recovery from the state of extreme dependency and fear of annihilation that threatens him, and can ‘go on being’. Winnicott stresses that the baby is unable to acknowledge mother’s responsiveness: he writes that ‘[w]hat the mother does well is not in any way apprehended by the infant at this stage’ (p. 64 this volume). What the mother intuitively recognises in her child is that with her cares he begins ‘to exist, to have experience, to build a personal ego’ (p. 64). From the very beginning the mother does not get a direct, narcissistically pleasing, acknowledgement from the baby of what she provides for him. Such acknowledgement requires the capacity to recognise his own ‘absolute dependency’, and this recognition, according to Winnicott, ‘is something which belongs to extreme sophistication and to a stage not always reached by adults’ (italics in the text, p. 64). It follows that the mother needs to have access to inner resources, to a nurturing and narcissistically reassuring ‘mother within’, if she is to trust confidently the loving mutuality of the relationship with her child.

In his writings, Winnicott has often described a good-enough mother as ‘ordinarily devoted’, which may suggest that maternality is an ‘ordinary’ quality of women. In ‘Primary Maternal Preoccupation’ he shows how extraordinary a mother’s devotion actually is, and the kind of demands it puts on a woman’s psychological resources.

It is interesting that Winnicott did not explore the effect of this particular state of mind on the mother herself. He indicated that, if all goes well, a woman on the whole will enjoy the experience. However, he was aware of the depth of maternal ambivalence – in ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’ (1949) he writes:

A mother has to be able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it. She cannot express it to him. If, for fear of what she may do, she cannot hate appropriately when hurt by her child she must fall back on masochism, and I think it is this that gives rise to the false theory of a natural masochism in women. The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may or may not come at a later date. Perhaps she is helped by some of the nursery rhymes she sings, which her baby enjoys but fortunately does not understand?

(p. 74)

And in ‘The Theory of the Parent–Infant Relationship’ (1960) he observes that ‘after conception … the woman begins to alter in her orientation, and to be concerned with the changes that are taking place within her’ (p. 53).

I would argue that the words ‘ordinarily devoted mother’, or ‘good-enough mother’ draw a veil on the real woman’s experience. Indeed, they take it for granted, just as the infant naturally does. The question of the dynamics of this ‘alteration’, or of the effects on the mother’s psyche of hating her beloved child, are central to the development of the mother–child relationship and to her own experience of maternality. The intensity of feelings for her child may surprise and overwhelm her, and while she may welcome the infant gradually settling inside her mind and overshadowing other concerns in her life, sooner or later her erotic and affectionate interest in the father, and her love and dedication to her family and external work, will reassert themselves. She may find that to some extent her personality has changed, that she has different priorities, a different sense of time, and that much has been gained, but something has been lost. The ‘ordinarily devoted’ mother is a woman who is able to accept and to work through all these momentous changes, and when she cannot do it, she is able to accept and work through her limitations and failures.

Psychoanalysis in the perinatal period

A patient’s pregnancy and early motherhood offer particular challenges in psychoanalysis. Some analysts see pregnancy as an obstacle to treatment, others as an opportunity to explore phantasies which would not otherwise be available. After the baby’s birth some analysts accept his or her presence in the consulting room for several weeks, and others prefer to resume the analysis when arrangements can be made for the mother to attend alone. While of course one tries to analyse consistently the patient’s responses to her condition, it is likely that the analyst’s experiences and beliefs play a part in whatever arrangement is decided upon and, subtly, in their interpretative stance. Schematically, we can think of two opposite situations: in one case the analyst feels quite maternal toward her patient and more or less consciously she inclines toward a supportive approach. This is in fact advocated by Daniel Stern (1995) in the context of what he describes as the ‘motherhood constellation’, a state of mind of adaptation to pregnancy and nursing, which centres on ‘the mother’s discourse with her own mother, especially with her own mother–as-mother–to-her-as-a-child; her discourse with herself, especially with herself-as-mother; and her discourse with her baby’ (p. 172). He emphasises the importance of a benevolent older female figure, representing the young mother’s mother – that, if the mother is in analysis, can be represented by the analyst. One can see Stern’s ‘good grandmother’ as fostering positive, narcissistically healthy unconscious processes in the new mother, providing a benign and supportive super-ego figure much needed in her new challenging tasks. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the analyst becomes concerned about her patient’s mothering and its negative effect on the patient’s child – the analyst may then unwittingly set up a persecutory atmosphere which repeats in the consulting room the sado-masochistic relationship the young mother has allegedly created with her child.

Aiming at maintaining a consistent analysis of the patient’s material, Dana Birksted-Breen (Chapter 2) illustrates the complex work that can be done in treatment, and the positive results for the patient and for her child. It includes acknowledgement of the patient’s love and competence as a mother and a robust investigation of her most aggressive phantasies and fears. She shows that analysis can acquire considerable depth during pregnancy. She writes about the ‘work of worrying’, that is the capacity to elaborate anxiety and repeatedly transform it, without attempting to eliminate it altogether, a work that can be facilitated in treatment and that tends to be avoided when there is excessive idealisation. The shadows of archaic phantasies are reawakened in pregnancy, a time during which a woman can work through, consciously and unconsciously, those old ghosts carrying the fear of death and the hope of life. How those phantasies can and need to be elaborated in psychoanalysis is the main thread of the paper. The pregnant patient’s inward focus is respected by the analyst, while her defensiveness and narcissistic withdrawal can be interpreted, and the patient is allowed to experience her fears of the analyst’s attacks and envy – a challenge not only for the patient but also for the analyst. Birksted-Breen conveys the importance of investigating the patient’s negative feelings, her aggressive phantasies and fears in order to strengthen her capacity to hold them in mind and not be persecuted and threatened by them.

The advantages and limitations of psychoanalysis in the perinatal period have also been discussed by Rosemary Balsam. She has written extensively on issues of motherhood and female gender identification and is contributing significantly to the present debate around gender issues which is alive particularly in American psychoanalytic circles (Balsam 2010). She has shown (2000) how the perinatal patient is able to bring to the sessions feelings and images of her own mother and of her child that at other times may not be so vividly present, or perhaps may even be ‘forgotten’. In the consulting room, the analyst is able to observe her patient repeating with her infant, subtly and unconsciously, a mitigated version of what she had been complaining was her mother’s behaviour toward her. This exemplifies vividly how the repetition and transmission of modes of relating can be present but almost imperceptible, the mother being totally unaware of the nuances of her behaviour.

Psychoanalysis and the pregnant body

If we turn our attention to the child and to what she may internalise from the mother, we know from analytic work with children that they are indeed curious about the mother’s body and its functioning, and that they have ‘theories’ to explain what is happening inside it. Freud was in no doubt about childhood sexual curiosity. Not only did he theorise that the child believes her mother has a penis, but he also presented us with Little Hans (1909) trying to find out how things really stand and asking pertinent questions to his pregnant mother. And it is well known that Melanie Klein (see, for instance, 1928) gave great importance in the child’s development to his or her phantasies about the mother’s body and about what goes on inside it.

Adult patients bring to analysis, often within the transference, memories from childhood that point to awareness of one’s body development and to curiosity about the maternal body. Balsam (2003) proposes that the pregnant body as the ‘premier icon of the mature female body’ has been erased from psychoanalytic writings. In Chapter 4, this volume, she observes that ‘this symbol of fertile maternity is a major conscious and social focus of attention for adults and children of both sexes’, yet it is neglected in psychoanalysis. She focuses on her patients’ communication regarding the body, in particular the pregnant body, and their memories of their mothers’ pregnancy. She stresses the power of that image on the young female child who closely observes physical changes in her mother and their connections with mother’s changes of mood and their significance. The extreme attention, easily observable, with which a young child looks at and touches her (or his) mother’s body may give the little girl a positive indication of her future, or may contribute to a sense of distressing envious inferiority. The child makes a comparison between her own and her mother’s body, a comparison that she may repeat all her life in her close observation of her body and other women’s.

A different aspect of the mother–child bodily connection, seen now from the mother’s point of view, is described by Erna Furman, who discusses the issues at stake in the process of separation between mother and child. In the first part of Chapter 5 in this book, ‘On Motherhood’, she focuses on the maternal bodily feelings in the traumatic aftermath of an infant’s death. She points out the importance of understanding such death as a bodily felt loss for the mother, a loss which can become integrated psychologically only very gradually. This paper touches on and develops some of the main themes of her writing and working life. Furman was an eminent American psychoanalyst who wrote extensively on normal and pathological child development and parenting, on parental bereavement, and on the issue of separation between mothers and children. One of her best-known papers (1982) is entitled ‘Mothers Have to Be There to Be Left’, on the theme of leaving and being left. The issue of separation and loss is picked up in the paper published in the present book. After writing about the traumatic loss due to a young child’s death, she discusses healthy separation. She shows that in order for the mother to be able to separate from her child, she needs to be able to work on her own issues about separation. The importance of the mother’s allowing her child to find her or his own way cannot be overestimated. It involves for the mother an ongoing sense of loss of the relationship with the younger child in whose life the mother held such an important place. However, in the mother’s mind the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Part One Mothering in body and mind
• Part Two Subfertility and reproductive technologies
• Part Three When not all goes well