Maternal Desire

de Marneffe's Theories

Daphne de Marneffe, Ph.D., has conducted extensive work on maternal desire in her 2004 book, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life. In the book, de Marneffe theorizes a psychologically healthy and empowering-to-women form of maternal desire. As a feminist, de Marneffe is also interested in theorizing maternal desire in ways that are consistent with feminism and free from sentimentality and clichés. Most importantly, however, de Marneffe challenges the idea that women who desire to care for children are powerless and without agency, without the ability to influence their own lives, and revises the psychoanalytic view of the mother-infant relationship as a psychologically unhealthy merger.

In doing so, de Marneffe's core argument is that rather than a merger, the mother-infant and later mother-child relationship are best thought of as mutually responsive, with genuine relating at the core; thus, the interaction between a mother and her children gives both parties “a great deal more individuality than the somewhat swampy metaphor of merger evokes.” As a result, de Marneffe suggests that maternal desire should be viewed as a sign of a woman's healthy desire to care for and relate to children and, equally important, as a symbol of women's agency and power within both the mother-child relationship and the mother's own life.

de Marneffe defines maternal desire as a mother's desire to care for and relate to her children. She begins theorizing maternal desire by suggesting that contemporary women—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, when the desire to mother is discussed, 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 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 caregiver, 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.

...