de Marneffe, Daphne

Mutual Rather than Merger

de Marneffe begins theorizing maternal desire by suggesting that contemporary women—who have taken advantage of the successes of 1960s and 1970s American feminism—have a “new problem” in terms of mothering. Specifically, contemporary women need to resolve how to take advantage of the changes in their lives without shortchanging their desire to mother. de Marneffe also suggests that maternal desire must be addressed, because the subject “gets the most simplistic public airing, even by its partisans, and the side that mainstream feminism has done the least to support.” Thus, de Marneffe theorizes a more complex understanding of maternal desire that is consistent with the changes in women's lives brought about by American feminism as well as resists overly simple clichés both within feminism and culture.

With these goals in mind, de Marneffe begins by revising Nancy Chodorow's and Jessica Benjamin's class work on the mother-infant relationship. de Marneffe suggests that recent mother-infant research has shown that “the infant expresses his or her agency in encounters with the care giver, and that the care giver and baby are extraordinarily attuned to their unique interaction from very early on.” As a result, even within the demanding first six months of an infant's life, more recent research suggests that the dynamic between mother and child is best thought of as a mutually responsive pattern of attentiveness with, again, genuine relating at the core of the relationship. Thus, de Marneffe also argues that viewing the relationship as mutually responsive also grants both mothers and children more agency and individuality than when the relationship is viewed as a merger.

Moreover, de Marneffe also suggests that viewing the relationship as mutually responsive fundamentally alters what counts as psychologically healthy interaction between a mother and her child. Drawing on recent attachment literature and, again, more current mother-infant research, de Marneffe argues that instead of physical separation as a sign of a mother's health, which is Benjamin's view, a care giver's self-reflective responsiveness to a child is far better indicator of a woman's health. Indeed, a mother's ability both to reflect on and communicate about her own childhood experiences and with her child are signs of the mother's own healthy sense of self and agency. A mother's ability to do so is also more crucial to a child's ability to develop both an independent sense of self and recognition of the mother's own individuality and agency. In other words, a mother's own internal or inner life and her ability to communicate that to and in relationship with her child is far more important to healthy mutual recognition of agency and connection for both the mother and child.

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