Psychoanalysis and Maternal Absence

From the Traumatic to Faith and Trust

Ofrit Shapira-Berman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000551693
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Psychanalyse

Experience of maternal absence manifests in a variety of ways and this book explores a selection of its emotional, psychical, and somatic consequences as they relate to an individual's relationship with their body, psychic-emotional internal life, and intimate relationships.

This book is not about mothers, but how individuals handle the trauma of mothers they have not had. Spanning backgrounds such as the collective child-rearing method of the kibbutz in Israel through to the possible difficulties of children who are parented by single parents, born out of sperm or egg donation, and adults who have suffered chronic sexual abuse, Shapira-Berman observes the precarious position of the analyst and the tension between the acts of witnessing and participating in client interventions. Espousing the values of authenticity and creativity, this text concludes with a reconfiguration of the roles of faith and trust within psychoanalysis and offers hope to those on their therapeutic journeys.

This book will be a valuable resource for psychotherapists, as well as for various undergraduate and postgraduate studies in object relations, childhood trauma, sexual trauma and clinical therapy.

Chapter 1
A “mother-of-one’s-own”
An analytic perspective of object-relationships of adult patients raised in the kibbutz¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003203193-2

Introduction

Winnicott (1960) famously wrote, “There is no such thing as a baby.” That is to say that babies and mothers should be perceived as a unit, especially at the beginning of life, as you cannot expect babies to thrive without their mothers. I think of Winnicott’s statement as the first half of a paradox. The second half is: Anyone can see that there are a mother and an infant who are separate beings. Without the second half of the paradox, the mother and the infant are one, and no development can occur (Ogden, 1994, p. 4). Winnicott elaborated on the issue of the crucial significance of the infant receiving maternal care in numerous articles. One of Winnicott’s (1963a) most significant contributions to traditional psychoanalysis is his emphasis on the “external factor,” i.e., the significance of the actual external environment (the mother) who is responsible for making active adaptation to the baby’s needs (1963, p. 340). This “external factor” is so significant to the infant’s well-being that early traumatic separations can lead to physical illness. Moreover, this awareness of total dependency and vulnerability on the baby’s part may be experienced as so threatening and potentially annihilating that the baby may feel the need to defend him- or herself by experiencing (unconscious) “death wishes” that may serve the baby’s need to feel in control.

Although Winnicott alternates between the concepts of “mother” (1958 [1965, p. 37]) and “maternal figure” (1965, pp. 9, 34), he does seem to suggest that these concepts are not the same (1958 [1965, p. 34]) in terms of their significance to the baby’s psychic welfare. In his paper “The Theory of Parent–Infant Relationship,” Winnicott clearly states:

The mental health of the individual, in the sense of freedom from psychosis or liability to psychosis (schizophrenia), is laid down by this maternal care, which when it goes well is scarcely noticed, and is a continuation of the psychological provision that characterizes the prenatal state.

(1960, p. 49, italics added)

This seems to be a significant recognition and suggestion of the possible differences between “maternal care” and the care of a “maternal figure”; by referring to the prenatal state, there can be no mistaking the significance and particularity that Winnicott attributes to the biological mother. Referring to a “biological” quality of mothering does raise questions, but taking into account Winnicott’s theory of the psyche-soma (1949/1975), we should be willing to examine that there is, indeed, a significant impact of the biological mother’s soma on the development of the baby’s psyche.

Following Winnicott’s (1949/1975) and Bion’s (1962a) ideas, I am suggesting that the interactions between “psyche” and “soma” are not merely intra-psychic (i.e., the baby’s psyche and soma) but also interpersonal (i.e., for example – the baby’s psyche and mother’s soma). As exciting and essential as this line of inquiry may be, I will focus on the long-term effects seen in adults who, as babies, did not have a “mother of their own,” not taking up the question of biological as compared with non-biological mothering².

Winnicott (1963b) offers an explanation for the reluctance of “traditional” psychoanalysis to examine and write about the environmental factor, but suggests that psychoanalysis was by then already established enough to be able “to afford to examine the external factor both bad and good” (p. 340). This issue of the measure of “realness” (or accuracy) of the infant’s perception of his environment in an earlier paper (1960). In this paper, Winnicott addresses the similarities and differences between the patient’s infancy and his or her experience in analysis. He stresses that

The paradox is that what is good and bad in the infant’s environment is not, in fact, a projection, but despite this, it is necessary if the individual infant is to develop healthily, that everything shall seem to him to be a projection.

(p. 567)

Here, Winnicott tackles another matter relevant to my thesis that the infant’s mother holds significance, emphasizing that this mother, who performs the needed childcare, is not merely a projective “makeup” on behalf of the baby. This could also be read as Winnicott making the point that the infant’s mother is unlike other maternal figures as far as the baby may be concerned. Yet, this is not to say that other care-givers should not support parents, but it is to say that there are “things” which the infant’s biological mother can provide her baby that no other figure can. The fact that the mother has carried her baby physically during forty weeks of pregnancy cannot be devoid of meaning, psychically and physically, both for the mother and infant. By suggesting that the “mother” is not merely a projection of the infant that can be received and contained by “any figure,” I understand Winnicott to suggest that each mother has her unique way of taking care of her infant and that uniqueness holds significance to the infant’s emotional and psychic well-being. By addressing the mother’s preparation for her baby’s psychic holding during the last stages of her pregnancy, Winnicott (1963b, p. 340) makes a subtle, albeit significant, reference to the biological mothering as being of crucial importance to the mother–infant relations.

I aim to address and re-evaluate some of the possible consequences of the unique mode of child-rearing that was the norm in Israeli kibbutzim at that time. I am suggesting that what the kibbutz infant and child were missing was “a mother of one’s own.” These infants and children were subjected to multiple care-givers while the mothers (and fathers) had little or no influence on their children’s daily lives, and no “active adaptation” was allowed. Having said that, and in consistency with our psychoanalytic perspective regarding the complex interactions of nature and nurture, the influences of any particular upbringing are never identical, as Winnicott says it so well:

Infants come into being different according to whether the conditions are favorable or unfavorable. At the same time, conditions do not determine the infant’s potential. This is inherited, and it is legitimate to study this inherited potential of the individual as a separate issue, always provided that it is accepted that the inherited potential of an infant cannot become an infant unless linked to maternal care.

(Winnicott, 1960, p. 589, italics in original)

This is, in my eyes, a focal point in Winnicott’s theory of maternal care and the development of a healthy baby, as well as a focal point of my proposed thesis regarding the possible effects of growing up in a kibbutz. Babies raised by their own mothers experience a variety of difficulties in integrating their fantasies (internal reality) with their mothers’ external reality. The infant–mother unit is naturally exposed to various internal and external effects, influencing or influenced by both the infant and the mother. Following Fairbairn’s (1944, p. 110) conception of the impact of the infant’s inevitable traumatic experience deriving from his or her encounter with the limits of the mother’s capacity to love the child and to accept the baby’s love, Ogden (2010) further elaborates on the question that follows from this notion. He quotes Fairbairn (1940/1952, p. 13):

Does “failure on the part of the mother to convince the child that she really loves him as a person” reflect the mother’s failure to be convincing, or does it reflect the child’s failure/inability to be convinced, i.e., the child’s inability to love?

Ogden (2010) indicates that his response to this question, “leans in the direction of the former interpretation, but by no means, rules out the other” (p. 103). Ogden elaborates on this idea and states that

every infant or child accurately perceives the limits of the mother’s ability to love him: and, at the same time, every infant or child misinterprets inevitable privations as the mother’s lack of love for him. From this vantage point, Fairbairn’s conception of early psychic development should be considered a trauma theory. To some degree, each baby is traumatized by his realistic perception that he is fully dependent on a mother whose capacity to love him has passed a breaking point.

(p. 103)

Following Fairbairn’s concept of the limits of the mother’s love and Ogden’s elaboration of this, I would like to suggest that what is valid for babies who are raised by their “own mothers” has to be even more true for kibbutz babies who were deprived of having a “mother of their own.” By this, I refer to the unique, particular way of child-rearing in the kibbutz system, as will be described later.

I have come to understand that although each infant raised in the kibbutz system had a different mother, the lives of these individuals – on reaching adulthood – evidenced similar pathology in their capacity to form mature object-relationships. I do not think there is disagreement among analysts concerning the idea that experiences in infancy and early childhood influence one’s subsequent life in fundamental and life-long ways. However, there is a dispute concerning measuring the mother’s degree of influence in terms of the quality and quantity of time she spends with her infant/child. I propose that these disputes are not only psychological but political as well. Positioning the infant’s own mother as the care-giver (for whom there is no other equivalent care-taker of the infant) may add further complexity to the decisions many women make regarding how to combine and prioritize motherhood and career. The idea that there may not be a genuine, good-enough substitute for the mother is something that I (as both a mother and someone who highly values her career) feel is vital to re-evaluate. How significant is the mother’s care, specifically in the early stages of the infant’s life? I chose to re-examine this turbulent issue by studying adult patients raised in the Israeli kibbutz’s unique system. Although they represent, in my eyes, an extreme case, I do think an in-depth re-examination of their upbringing and possible consequences can benefit us. My aim is in no way to blame mothers or to disapprove of mothers pursuing a career. Neither am I proposing that mothers (and parents generally) should not use the support of nannies, kindergartens, or any other child-rearing support systems. Instead, I aim to better understand how psychoanalysis can help patients with this type of kibbutz upbringing; a lack of consistently involved early maternal care, and multiple care-takers during daytime and none during the night had negative consequences.

I would like to consider Fairbairn’s concept of the “tantalizing object” (1944, p. 112) regarding the kibbutz’s mothers because of the unique way they were present in their infants’ lives – the average kibbutz mother was not absent from her infant’s life. Still, neither was she able to actively adapt to the infant’s needs. The kibbutz infants and children were not “neglected” in how we have come to perceive and understand “neglect.” It can be said that they were provided with quite generous care, addressing all their basic needs. And yet, given the unique circumstances of their upbringing – mainly the fact that they spent 21 hours a day without their parents – they were most certainly deprived of what Winnicott (1949/1975) considers crucial: active adaptation on behalf of the infant’s mother. Fairbairn’s (1944, p. 112) term “tantalizing” object refers to the infant’s splitting of the “unsatisfactory” (internal) mother-object. The infant internalizes (unconsciously identifies with) the unsatisfactory mother and then splits this object into (1) the tantalizing (internal) object, and (2) the rejecting (internal) object. Winnicott (1974) refers to what he describes as the “tantalizing mother” in his paper “Fear of Breakdown”:

It is wrong to think of psychotic illness as a breakdown. It is a defense organization relative to a primitive agony. It is usually successful (except when the facilitating environment has been not deficient but tantalizing, perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a human baby).

(p. 104)

Since parents in the kibbutz had little “say” regarding their children’s upbringing and were physically separated from them, they were at a severe disadvantage in terms of being able to “hold” and/or “contain” their children’s emotional distress (Ogden, 2004). In the absence of maternal consistent “holding”–“containing”–“dreaming” of the infant’s experiences, it can be reasonably assumed that this vacuum would be filled with internalizations of “bad objects” as a way of compensating and comforting oneself (Fairbairn, 1944). The infant/child may rely heavily on his or her internal object-relations with these internalizations of bad-tantalizing (i.e., seducing–rejecting) internal objects. One of the splits the kibbutz infant experienced was between the loving object and the “authoritative” one. Parents in the kibbutz had no authority over the rearing of their infant (it was the kibbutz’s management who had the final say on everything). Since their actual–physical participation in their children’s life was minimal (amounting to three hours a day), the care-taker who was there to “handle” and “hold” the infant and child was not the parent who loved her or him. This split is often evident in the analytic experience (transference and countertransference) with adult patients who grew up in the kibbutz, as I will illustrate and, I propose, is closely related to the actual lack of “unity” between such infants and their mothers. Of mother–infant unity, Winnicott (1960, p. 587) writes, “The infant and the maternal care together form a unit,” which, from his perspective, is the most crucial component of the infant’s healthy development.

Infants’ development in terms of “unity” and “otherness”

Development requires not only the experience of “unity,” but that of “otherness” as well (Ogden, 1985). As analysts, we often hold our patient’s mothers in mind. What I mean is that we unfold the mother, “dream” her, and in a way “carry” her, for the patient until the patient can carry (hold) her for him- or herself, internally in a way that informs, not suffocates, who the patient is. The patient’s relationship with the unconscious internal object mother plays a significant role in the qualities of internal and external object-relationships, including transferences in the analytic relationship.

Winnicott seems to be the analyst who has contributed most to an analytic understanding of the unique relationship between infant and mother (1945, 1960, 1963a, 1963b) and the manifestations of the early mother–infant relationship in the analytic relationship. Ogden (1985) in discussing various aspects of Winnicott’s work says:

When the infant is in the womb, the mother’s role is to provide an environment that will buy the infant time that he needs to mature before he will have to face the inevitable task of physical separation at birth. In precisely the same way, the mother’s role in the first months of life before the infant enters in...