Women, Mothers, Subjects

New Explorations of The Maternal

Maura Sheehy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317676935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This collection, drawn from twelve years of the influential journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, offers a groundbreaking advance in thinking and theorizing about what happens to women when they become mothers. It explores how women are changed and shaped by interaction with their children and the cultural constructs about motherhood in which they are embedded. Distinguished psychoanalysts, philosophers, feminists, gender and cultural theorists explore the meeting place of cultural representations of motherhood, maternal theory, and mothers interacting in the clinical setting and with their children, to illuminate how the process of becoming a mother creates and informs female subjectivity, identity, desire, expression, aggression, ambition, shame, envy, and relationships. Contributors find mothers to be complex subjects negotiating rich hybrid identities that explode received notions of maternal and even female subjectivity in their complexity. They create an exciting and very accessible new set of ideas and templates for thinking about mothers and women that will be of value to clinicians, academics, and mothers alike.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

Introduction: Writing of Mothers

By Maura Sheehy

This volume, a collection of essays published in the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality over the last 13 years, is a plunge into the many registers of the expanding new field of study known as The Maternal—intrapsychic, theoretical, clinical, philosophical, intersubjective, social and political—in which ideas about motherhood, maternal subjectivity, and women’s lives percolate and work upon us. Here, emerging as if from having contrast dye applied to the everyday, we find an expanse of unexamined, unconscious beliefs about mothers and mothering, maternal experience and subjectivity that have only just begun to be heard from and about. Foundational discourses such as patriarchal constructions of “natural” womanhood catch us all up in a moebius loop of feminine aggrandizement and devaluation that makes us question the possibility that a woman can be a thinking, desiring, enunciating mother-as-subject and a “good” mother, focused enough on nurturing, sacrificing enough to allow her child or children’s subjectivity to flourish. And then, just as this new territory might be explored or these voices heard, so often the maternal experience is then doubly obscured and dismissed as part of the nondescript and untextured plain of householdery—just laundry, meal-making, mess-cleaning and child-rearing here folks, nothing to see.

Despite the many gains of feminism, this binary maternal subjectivity versus good motherhood has endured, and has resulted in a terrible poverty of language and concept with which to speak or theorize about real lived experiences of motherhood. Thanks now to the work of artists, analysts, academics, writers, mothers and others who are reformulating and exploring territories of the maternal, we are moving beyond projects geared towards gleaning new trinkets of wisdom to enhance our knowledge of babies, child-rearing, or how to be a better, more development-nurturing mother, and beyond projects that reinforce the binary. We are finding new conceptions of The Maternal that embrace the multiplicities and motion, the erotics and play, the intersubjective interplays and unfoldings of self that are at work, and gaining a deeper understanding of the forces that prevent their being known.

These essays open up a meta-view on The Maternal and reveal how many antiquated and limited conceptions of the maternal are cooked into the frameworks of our thinking about women, children, human development, subject/object relations, and constructions of race and gender that we all carry within us. They open up a fascinating roadmap to the kinds of unpacking that needs to be done—from theoretical investigations into maternal subjectivity and its relation to intersubjective phenomena, to peeling back newly complex layers of maternal transferences in the consulting room and beyond, to critiques of popular culture and media, where discourses of the maternal are framed and reified and then internalized by all of us. As the omnipresence of maternal discourses is revealed, we see clearly the limitations of the language and theory we have for it and how much work is to be done.

Power, of course, figures into how we talk to ourselves in our culture about women who become mothers—I speak of “women who become mothers” to remind us that discourses of women and mothers and the misogyny that structures them are never unentwined. The roots of our ideas about the maternal slink always back to discourse and ideology as much as they do to experience, memory, loss, longing and desire, and so always back again to power. The way that a woman who becomes a mother’s subjectivity is imagined, described, threatened, threatening, experienced, denied, maintained, performed, or embodied, is riven with the accepted constructions of women, gender, sexuality, and self and other that we all “know to be true” but have not tended to question. When we talk about how women talk to themselves, and how the world talks to them about themselves, we must think about the enormous, never-ending interest in regulating women that is saturated into our global culture and its economies. This work, then, is a feminist project.

So, here, for example, is a question: “What happens to a woman when she becomes a mother?” Asked by Lisa Baraitser in her essay ‘Mum’s the Word: Intersubjectivity, Alterity, and the Maternal Subject,’ the question’s simplicity, even its apparent obviousness, belies the fact that no answer is to be found for it in anywhere in the psychoanalytic canon—nor even any sustained engagement with it of any kind. Yes, Winnicott (1949) cracked open the door into the maternal psyche, allowing room for maternal hate and ambivalence (in just the right amount, of course), and then infant research, attachment theory, and theories of intersubjectivity kicked the door wider with ideas about mutual regulation, mentalization, and recognition (Beebe and Lach-mann, 2005; Fonagy, 2001; Stern, 1998; Benjamin, 1977, 1988). But the main intended beneficiary of the expanded territory was the child and her developmental and emotional needs, to which the explorers promptly returned. Second-wave feminism tried to take the door to female subjectivity off its patriarchal hinges altogether, but ultimately the goal wasn’t to liberate mothers as much as to liberate women from motherhood. The thrust was a move to decouple the relation of woman/mother as a given, rather than to enunciate maternal subjectivity. It has taken another 30 years to be able to think of The Maternal as a potent subject of study, and of maternal subjectivity as anything but an oxymoron.

Questions like these have simply not been asked until now: How does a woman understand her experience of herself as a mother and how it relates, or doesn’t, to her other, more ongoing, experiences of herself? How does she bring these various subject positions into relationship? How does the ongoing bump-up against the infant/child influence or even structure her subjectivity? And – hold on – what even goes on between a mother and her kids for her? And what is the toll on a mother of her sudden insertion into the Discourse of the Maternal—all the eons of sedimented thoughts about, and expectations of, what a mother is and should be? What is the effect of all of this on her continued development?

Mostly, the psychological concepts we have that relate to the specifically maternal amount to a “description of mothering,” says Baraitser. If they even address the woman’s experience at all. [One might say the same for fathers—and should—but here we will take up the Maternal.] Essentially what are on offer are more endless iterations of “what makes a good mommy or a bad mommy?” As Suzanne Juhasz says in ‘Mother-Writing and the Narrative of Maternal Subjectivity,’ “Representation of maternal subjectivity is of great importance, for not only has it been culturally denied in Western history, but even now, despite frequent references to its existence, there is no fully-developed theory of maternal subjectivity in psychoanalytic discourse.”

Infant research and attachment theory have atomized the maternal–infant relationship into ever more micro moments of communication across the terra incognita of self/other space, trying to illuminate the path to optimal child development (Beebe and Lachmann, 2005; Fonagy and Target, 1997). Therapists—metaphorical mothers—hungrily extrapolate the gleanings to the consulting room, (Kraemer, 1996). Indeed, the relationship between mother and child has been a primordial loam, technically and theoretically, for psychoanalysis. Yet all this without an accompanying body of study about the woman’s—mother’s—experience of it? It’s odd to consider.

Why wouldn’t we psychoanalysts want to understand—plunder, even—this affective and psychic landscape, for all the interpersonal, intersubjective, intrapsychic work that gets done here, for the insights into the terrains of pleasure, desire, power, paradox, terror, ambivalence, liminality, hybridity? Why wouldn’t philosophy want to access the themes and variations on selfhood and subjectivity that play out in a woman’s experience of motherhood? Amidst fear and confusion, loss and gain, formlessness and structure, embodiment of the most visceral and emotional sort, women have a profound experience that begins inside their very bodies and challenges the concept of the unitary self to the core, all whilst they inhabit a culture which regulates maternal thinking from every quarter—religious, political, physical, emotional, and cultural. Why is all this left on the table? How could this rich text not be taken up and read more closely?

As the writers in this volume ponder these questions they are drawn again and again back to the reality of the never-fully-answered questions about the framing of female identity and subjectivity itself, and the forces that work against its easy emergence. Waves and decades of feminists have worked to break up gender fixities (Dimen, 2003; Harris, 2008) so that women could enunciate a place of selfhood apart from their construction as the messy, abjected other to the Unitary Male Subject posited by Western patriarchy. And now, argues Baraitser in ‘Oi Mother, Keep Ye’ Hair On!: Impossible Transformations of Maternal Subjectivity,’ much of the otherness once assigned to the feminine—the affective, physical, relational, and care-related, the chaotic, and irrational—is sloughed off onto the Maternal. The trip from woman to mother is often portrayed as a “transformation” from a now supposedly clean, crisp, organized, unitary pre-maternal (a double of the male subject she was once the “other” to) while the maternal is depicted as a place of formlessness, anxiety and disequilibrium similar to the Kristeva (1982) abject. The Maternal is that symbolic place where boundaries between self and other, subject and object, break down into the horror of our originary submersion in the womb’s boundarylessness, amidst the fluids and meconium and blood and vernix, and then that remembering must be denied. What we don’t see or think much of is about play and exploration, fluidity that is not

The maternal was doubly marked as the regressive when, as a movement, generally, second-wave feminism was framed as a daughter’s struggle, and relationships to the maternal were fraught by the task of having to break with past constructions of the feminine ideal and lived realities of women’s lives. In this context, the coming into adult womanhood was often framed as a break from one’s mother, philosophically as well as emotionally and psychologically, and symbolically as a break from the messy otherness of the feminine. As art historian Andrea Liss (2009) has written, “the mother, however, remained a silent outcast for many feminists who strategically needed to distance themselves from all that was culturally coded as passive, weak, and irrational.”

The essays here present some of the most extensive work to date to reformulate concepts of the maternal. Possibly the most powerful pivot that needed to be made is the shift from viewing and theorizing the maternal from the point-of-view of the daughter and of the child to that of the mother. (Baraitser, 2009; Parker, 2005; Kraemer, 1996; Liss, 2009; De Marneffe, 2004) The shift to recognition and exploration of maternal subjectivity has opened up a view into the maternal experience and how maternal desire exerts both destabilizing and structuring forces upon identity and functioning. We find new templates for complex new experiences of selfhood and relationship that play with temporality and our understanding of self/other relations, and we find in all these a route out of the stifling, musty, still air that permeates so many of the prevalent notions about motherhood in our culture.

So there is the question of what maternal subjectivity is and how it forms, and many of the writers here have a crack at it and debate it—something we need much more of. They address the challenges that come with claiming maternal subjectivity—the how a woman synthesizes her different subject positions and her different (and often con-flictual) desires and roles and the stereotypes that abound about her. Not to mention how she reconciles her own experience with that of her mother, grandmothers, aunts, and previous generations of women all of whom surely had very different options and experiences, and hugely different language (if any at all) with which to frame and share them.

Miri Rozmarin, in her paper ‘Maternal Silence’, for instance, traces back to De Beauvoir (1989) the notion that for a woman to claim a real, rather than illusory, subjectivity, she must very carefully divide and police her mother self and her non-mother self, lest the mother part engulf the whole. Our very culture buys into and reinforces this notion, of course, but trivializes it into cat fights and “mommy wars” and debates about working versus stay-at-home motherhood, refusing to think maternal subjectivity, to think about the subject positions of a woman who is a mother as simultaneous or interwoven, rather than in a death match for supremacy. The political culture in the US participates by denying practical supports such as universal day care or extended family leave rights or affordable health care, all of which could help women and families achieve a smoother day-to-day integration of work achievement and parenting.

But at base there is, perhaps, Comparative Literature Professor Susan Suleiman’s (1985) classic formulation that, according to psychoanalytic theory, “Mothers don’t write, they are written.” Our culture has written and written the mother. She is the studied, the represented, the eternal object who gives birth to a subject and is then returned again to objecthood. Written in the declarative mood: a mother this, a mother that, a mother must or should, does or doesn’t, is or isn’t, feels, thinks, wants. With a bit of Foucault’s Panopticon (1995) thrown in: everyone is watching her, evaluating, judging. The writing of mothers again underlines Kristeva’s (1977, 1982) argument (also De Beauvoir’s) that, once the baby is born, mother is rendered abject and voiceless and ceases to have a presence. Subjectivity passes over her to the offspring. So many of the writers in this volume speak of silences, the unspoken, and the untheorized, and of the power of words—written or unwritten—to help orient women, whether mothers or not, in the work of claiming subjectivity. For Bassin and Juhasz in different ways the written word and the writing process help structure maternal identity and subjectivity from disparate bits. For Rozmarin there is a need for words to describe the quality of a silence that can be generative and witnessing.

In ‘Mothers, Monsters, Mentors’, an exploration of women’s creative difficulties and their relationship to mothers, mentors, and envy, Adrienne Harris finds a shame-soaked misogyny strangling women’s creative voices. “A misogyny that is internal, external, relational, social and intrapsychic, real and imaginary,” leads to “the gloomy difficulties women have with self-love, self-esteem, and the cache of disgust and shame that adheres to many women’s experience of femininity.” I think this same misogyny and shame adhere to many women’s experiences of and discourses around the maternal. I have often encountered my own shame when trying to integrate my maternal and professional lives, and the shaming attitudes of others in response to work around maternal subjectivity and women’s struggles to claim it, and I find maternal shame endlessly experienced by my patients. “My mother did it, why can’t I?” is an oft-heard retort by mothers in my practice when I take their misery or struggle to orient themselves amidst their many parts and feelings seriously. As they collude with the culture’s maternal ideal (reinforced endlessly by the psychological field) that “a good mother” is a happy, busy, unconflicted mother, they split off great hunks of their own feelings, for fear they will harm their child’s mental health with their “selfishness”.

Harris, Ceccoli and Bassin frame women’s wrestle to find and claim subjectivity—in relation to mothers, men, and culture—largely as a daughter’s struggle, but Ceccoli elaborates on the crucial role to be played by a mother freed from shame around her own sexuality and subjectivity, and able to engage with her daughter in a developmental dance of ambivalence around separation and merger, identification and repudiation, agency and desire. Freud, Ceccoli laments, “occluded the role of maternal desire and its influence in the shaping of female sexuality,” and she echoes and builds upon work by Benjamin (1990, 1998), Kristeva (1977) and Parker (2005), in trying to address this issue. In clinical work with female patients, Ceccoli finds an “unspoken and unsymbolized [feminine and feminine sexuality] that reverberates through generations of mothers and daughters,” and “speaks symptomatically through the body” until she and her patients can find language for the many complex feelings and exchanges that must ensue between mother and daughter around about their bodies, hate, envy, desire, and everything else in the process of healthy development. Ceccoli, in her role as the symbolic mother, shows clearly the challenges involved in staying present with the shifting affects and forces in the room with her and her patients as she tries to stay aware of and hold onto her own subjectivity and desire while engaging with her patients’ complex and challenging identifications and disidentifications with her as they both work towards “finding those silenced words”. For Ceccoli argues that the words and language must be found—the maternal claiming of subjectivity alone is not enough.

The road to claiming subjectivity requires aggression, of course. But Harris tells us “Women too rarely make clear distinctions between agency and destructiveness, excitement and damage to others, competition and a feeling of or wish to murder.” And who could blame a woman who becomes a mother for such confusion when, for instance, psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch (1973), defined “the masochistic-feminine willingness to sacrifice” as the secret to good motherhood. This belief has formed a cornerstone to the core beliefs about mothers and motherhood that we all share. That, as Deutsch put...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Writing of Mothers
• Part I: Mothers in the Consulting Room
• Part II: Maternal Subjectivity
• Part III: Maternality and Writing, Creativity
• Part IV: Maternal Representation in Culture
• Index