What Do Mothers Want?

Developmental Perspectives, Clinical Challenges

Sheila F. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134912179
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What do mothers want and need from their parenting partners, their extended families, their friends, colleagues, and communities? And what can mental health professionals do to help them meet their daunting responsibilities in the contemporary world? The talented contributors to What Do Mothers Want? address these questions from perspectives that encompass differences in marital status, parental status, gender, and sexual orientation. Traversing the biological, psychological, cultural, and economic dimensions of mothering, they provide a compelling brief on the perplexing choices confronting mothers in the contemporary world.

Of course, mothers most basically want their children to be safe and healthy. But to this end they want and need many things: caring partners, intergenerational and community support, a responsive workplace, public services, and opportunities to share their experiences with other mothers. And they want their feelings and actions as mothers to be understood and accepted by those around them and by society at large. The role of psychotherapy in reaching these latter goals is taken up by many of the contributors. They reflect on the special psychological challenges of pregnancy, birth, and the arrival of a newborn into a couple's (whether hetero- or homosexual) life, and they address new venues of therapeutic assistance, such as brief low-cost therapy for at-risk mothers and infants and group interventions to help couples grow into the new role of parental couples.

Part I

What Mothers Want and Need

Chapter 1

The Psychic Landscape of Mothers

DANIEL N. STERN

First, I want to say that the question of what women want is nothing that a man should answer. I am deeply aware of that. So, instead of answering the question “What do mothers want?” I am going to address a different question: “Who are mothers?” from my perspective as a third-party observer. This perspective has an advantage: I can see mothers clearly from a certain distance.

I describe mostly first-time mothers but, in a slightly different and attenuated form, all of what I have to say also applies to second- and third-time mothers. It also applies to fathers, grandparents, or whoever is the primary caregiver. When I refer to mothers, as I do throughout, it does not matter which of these people we are talking about: the important thing is being the primary caregiver.

What I describe as the mother's psychic landscape is not something that has to be the way it is, not something that biology or evolution has insisted that it be, not the way that it is going to be in the future, not the way it is in other cultures. I am talkimg about what I probably should call the current mainstream Western narrative about what it is to be a mother and what is supposed to happen psychically. This particular mainstream narrative is one that fits very well with aspects of women's psychology, the biology of the culture, and the politics, so that it is remarkably stable but not immutable. It is important to know what this mainstream Western narrative is, because if you want to change it—for political, cultural, or personal reasons—you cannot do it unless you know what is involved. And I think a lot of people who try to change it do not really understand deeply what is involved in the psychic landscape of mothers as we see it now.

It is also important to make clear the notion of mental organizations. In clinical psychology, certainly among those writers involved with motivational systems (which means all the important ones essentially), understanding why people live as they do absolutely requires the formulation of some kind of organizing story, or reality. This story helps make coherent what people think, feel, do, and say. It makes it possible for people to assemble all the necessary behaviors so they can get done what it is they want done, whatever that is. Such a story goes by many names. It can be called a mental organization, for instance. Freud called these stories complexes. There were not many of these, and Freud did not really like the word (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967). These organizing motivational systems are difficult to describe, and my sense is that we all know that they are there and that we need them, but nobody knows exactly what they are. That is why I came up with the phrase “the motherhood constellation” (Stern, 1995). The term has no historical baggage, and nobody knows what it means. I do not know exactly what it means either. But it captures the essence of some kind of mental organization which is at least semistable. It makes clinical sense. The duration of this mental organization in a woman's life is variable.

MOTHERS, BABIES, AND LOVERS

So what is the motherhood constellation like? I shall describe several of its components. The first, and the one I shall spend the most time describing, I have been thinking about only recently; it is not in my book on the subject (Stern, 1995). It has to do with this: most mothers either fall in love with their babies, or want to, or wish they could, or regret that they have not. This is a very pervasive situation. It starts in pregnancy and obviously it continues after birth. Now, when I say falling in love, I mean it absolutely literally. It is one of the most overarching aspects of the mother's psychic landscape, which makes it very difficult to talk about. We do not know what love is, and I am certainly not going to try to define it here. But it is a lot easier to know what falling in love is, and so I will try to write about that.

One fascinating thing about falling in love is that it is a mental organizing state. It is not unique to motherhood, obviously, since most mothers have fallen in love several times in their lives before they have a baby. And that is very good. They have sort of oiled the equipment that is necessary to put this assembly of behaviors in good working order. Or it can happen for the first time when a woman has a baby.

Falling in love is a special mental organization that brings together and permeates how people feel about themselves and the world, what they think, how they feel, what they see, what they are attentive to. Falling in love pervades the entire perceived world for a period of time. It is one of the most potent organizers of mental life that we know of.

What is involved? Before I go into that, let me offer an example to use in comparing mothers and babies: two lovers at the height of the process of falling in love. In doing this, I follow William James's (1890) good old dictum. He said, if you are going to study something difficult like religion, find the most religious man in the world and go to him during the most religious holiday. You will find him in the middle of the most sacred religious act on that day. Watch and see what he is doing at the height of that moment and that is where you start. If you cannot explain that high point, you are never going to understand religion, anyway. So you had better start there.

That is why I am starting with lovers who are falling in love. When you fall in love there is an enormous overevaluation of the other person. Lovers do this all the time: they think that the person they love is the most beautiful and the most wonderful, and so on, and so on. So do most mothers. They think their babies are the most extraordinary creatures on earth. They really believe it. They act it and they feel it, and it goes very deep in them.

If your lover thinks that you are better than you are, you end up being better in some ways. When a mother thinks her baby is better, smarter, more advanced than he or she really is, the mother's behavior is pushed into what Vygotsky (1962) called the zone of proximal development, which means that she directs her behavior a little in advance of where the baby actually is developmentally. Doing that helps pull the baby along. So it turns out to be a necessary and extraordinarily useful teaching condition to be a little bit ahead of the baby, not too much ahead, but in that special zone that is achieved in part by overvaluing who or what the baby is at a given moment in time.

If, in fact, the mother does not think that her baby is the most extraordinary creature on earth, that is a bad sign for the immediate future. Clinically, it is something that makes you worry.

A second feature of falling in love is the way people look at each other. This is not a trivial remark. Lovers look at each other a long time. They can get lost in one another's eyes. There is a maxim, at least in most cultures, that if a man and a woman look at each other in the eyes without breaking gaze and without talking for more than seven seconds straight, they are either going to fight or make love. And this is roughly true. The intensity of the arousal is very high. It does not happen among adults, except between lovers; and it happens between mothers and babies—and of course between fathers and babies, too. (Because I am talking about mothers, I am not going to say “fathers, too” at every opportunity, but in those instances in which fathers are deeply involved with their babies, you should understand me as if I have.)

Mothers and babies can look at one another for literally minutes on end, when, in fact, babies would never direct that kind of attention to anybody else, nor would a mother gaze that way at anybody else's face. It is a kind of getting lost in one another's gaze. It is a kind of soul reading—a plummeting into the intersubjectivity of the other person, even if one does not know exactly what is at the bottom of the dive. It also obviously enhances the intimate contact that leads to bonding. There is greatly increased arousal in this way of being with another, and it is tolerated. The intensity of such a gaze may be one of the things that leads to attachment and to the singularity of the falling-in-love process. After a couple of months, it is probably more important for a baby which person he can look in the eyes for a long period of time than which person feeds him, who takes care of him, who spends more time with him. The gazing I am now talking about is separate from and parallel to the attachment system.

A third feature of falling in love is that there is a sort of mental interpenetration or submersion in the other but without any loss of self. The self is never lost in this process. Some part of knowing that it is you who is doing it stays with you. Now, whether you are a lover or a mother, you have to get to know this stranger, who is, at enormous speed, becoming familiar. The Japanese have a word for a “familiar stranger.” I forget what it is, but it is a wonderful term. This business of plummeting into the other person and being exquisitely sensitive to what that person may be thinking, feeling, wishing, intending at any one moment is part of the lovers’ situation, and it makes people extremely attentive and sensitive to one another. It gives that falling-in-love period a kind of reciprocal delicacy. It is an extraordinary feeling, and it is exactly what mothers do with their babies.

Plummeting into another's soul is probably one of the most serious things that goes on as mother falls in love with baby. What is at stake is nothing less than intersubjectivity. We are realizing more and more that intersubjectivity is one of the major issues and motivational systems in any intimate relationship having to do with love and attachment (Stern, 2004). It is in play all the time during psychotherapy, which is an intimate relationship of a kind. Intersubjectivity is the interpenetration of minds, so that one can say, “I know that you know that I know,” or “I feel that you feel that I feel . . .”

Intersubjectivity can be verbal, it can be nonverbal; it does not matter. It goes under many names. We talk about identification with the other, or about emotional contagion, or about resonance, or about projective identification. There are many other terms. But we are beginning to realize that the roots of intersubjectivity are several and that they probably have a very strong neuroscientific basis.

There is now fascinating work indicating a neurological basis for knowing what is in another person's mind—baby or adult. It turns out that we have “mirror neurons” (Gallese, 2001). Very briefly, what they do is this: when I (a baby) reach for the bottle, a pattern of neurons fires in my brain so that I can reach it. Near these neurons are mirror neurons that mirror the pattern. But they do not fire and move my arm. They just send another signal to the rest of the body. That is not very extraordinary.

What is extraordinary is that if you watch me (the baby, again) and you are paying attention to me, when I reach for the bottle, your mirror neurons fire, the very same ones that would make you do the same gesture (Gallese, 2001). So you know what it is like to be me. You are inside my body in a virtual sense. You have participated in the experience of the other. You are inside the other's skin. This is what is going on between a mother and a baby, and between lovers, all the time. There is a constant imagining or being inside the skin or participating in the other's experience by virtue of these mirror neurons. We do not know when these neurons kick in for babies, but they are certainly there with mothers.

There are also “adaptive oscillators,” which are essentially clocks in the body that time what you are doing and what somebody else is doing (Port and van Gelder, 1995). These clocks can be reset rapidly to synchronize with another's rate of movement. This is the kind of thing that goes on in an outfielder running to catch a baseball that is making an arc through the sky. He has to time the trajectory of the ball and his own speed so that he and the ball meet at the right moment. There are two actions that have to be coordinated and synchronized. Now, it gets even trickier if the other part of the interaction is not a ball in the air but another person who you are doing something with. We see this kind of exquisite coordination between people all the time. If two people (getting back to falling in love) have never kissed before, and all of a sudden, unexpectedly, they throw themselves into a passionate kiss, they very rarely break their front teeth. There is usually a soft landing. The reason is that both of them have timed their behavior, and each also experiences the timing of the other person's behavior, all out of awareness. So each one is inside the other person's body as well as in his or her own body.

We have come to view intersubjectivity as one of the most pervasive aspects of human behavior. We all live in an intersubjective matrix, and this is true from the beginning of life. We are beginning to look at things like early infant imitation (for example, the baby sticking out the tongue when the experimenter or the mother or father sticks out his or her tongue) (Meltzoff and Moore, 1977). This is a form of “primary intersubjectivity” (Trevarthen, 1979).

One of the most striking and remarkable aspects of autism is that the capacity for intersubjectivity seems to be limited or absent. Those who suffer from autism do not participate in the other's experience.

A friend of mine showed me a lovely example of the difference in the capacity for intersubjectivity between autistic and nonautistic children. Pretend you are the mom, or the experimenter. Put your hands up, palms facing out, in patty-cake position. Most children will then put their palms against your palms in what seems to be an imitation of the grown-up gesture. But is it? The infant saw the mother's palms but now sees the backs of his own hands. The baby is imitating as if he were the other. Nonautistic children act as if they are doing the imitation from within the center of the other person, not from within their own center; and that's what we mean by other-centered participation.

Autistic children, on the contrary, place the backs of their hands against the up-raised palms of the adult's so that they see in themselves exactly what they see in the adult. They are imitating from their own point of view. There is only partial intersubjectivity.

Intersubjectivity is not simply a capacity we have. I would say that it is a major motivational system. It has the same importance for species survival and for individual survival as sex and attachment. You cannot live if you do not constantly search for intersubjective relatedness. There has to be a constant intersubjective orientation going on every minute of the time when you are with a baby, when you are with a lover, and when you are in a therapy process.

(Intersubjectivity is a little less acute in therapy than in the other situations because therapists do not know how to listen as well as mothers do.)

The fourth feature of falling in love is that there is a physical symmetry in the movements between the lovers. If you watch two lovers at a café, they trace a dance that is symmetrical and synchronous in the sense that they go toward each other and then away from one another at the same moment. Their timing is exquisitely linked, not perfect but awfully good. You also see this synchronicity with babies and mothers. They are locked into one another in this way, and this facilitates bonding.

The fifth factor in falling in love is that you want to be with the other person, you want to be in his or her presence, you want to be alongside the other, either touching or at least within his or her aura, a few feet away, not much more. This desire for physical closeness is important because it teaches the mother and the baby how to manipulate and negotiate social distancing. All the sense of appropriate social distancing that is necessary to be a human being in social interactions comes from this source. The basis for social distancing, in other words, is probably the way people do it in the falling-in-love process. It is the intimate mode of proxemics.

The sixth feature of falling in love is the desire to touch and embrace, be close and have physical contact. I am not talking about sex. I am leaving sex out of this. In fact, I do not think sex is very important in the mother-baby tie. As you can see, much of what I am talking about is different from many of the familiar psychoanalytic traditions.

Lovers touch, they hold hands, they lean against one another, they stroke one another's face and head. What about mothers and babies? Now, that's very interesting—they do the same things. Their touching is completely expectable. You can see this even with babies in isolettes after they are born. Let us say a mother has had a C-section or a premature baby who went right into an isolette. Even those mothers, who have had no opportunity to spend time with their babies, do exactly the same things when they see their babies for the first time. Klaus and Kennel (1976) showed that the first-time mothers are allowed to touch their babies, most do the same t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• I. What Mothers Want and Need
• II. Women’s Bodies: Choices and Dilemmas
• III. Pulling It All Together
• Author Index
• Subject Index