Psychoanalysis and Motherhood

Classic Thought: Emphasis on the Father

Classical psychoanalytic thought granted the Oedipus complex a central place as a universal organizing structure of the human psyche. The father, who represents social prohibitions and norms as governed by language, is the significant figure of this narrative, which describes the process of initiation into social life. Both sexes have a powerful bond with the mother, their first love object. Psychological growth necessitates that both relinquish this initial desire for the mother. Jacques Lacan reinforced the centrality of the father. In his theory, the mother is an overwhelming, devouring force from which the child must detach. The mother is thus positioned as an eternal lost object of the child's inner world, outside language. Within the symbolic social world, she is powerless and cannot occupy a subject position.

The emphasis on the father not only marginalized mothers, but also led to difficulties in theorizing mother-daughter relations. Feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray have stressed the importance of writing a genealogy of motherhood, partly for enabling daughters to position themselves in relation to their mothers rather than simply repudiating them.

Cultural representations of mothers during the last few decades tended to either reproduce the classical images and their derivatives or attempted to reject them. Feminist critique refers to the classical theories as simultaneously reflecting and reproducing a hierarchal patriarchal order of modern Western society.

Already in the mid-1920s, critics commented on the phallocentric nature of the classical theory. Female analysts of that period, such as Helene Deutsch, maintained that the capacity to give birth is a landmark of feminine identity. Motherhood was intertwined with femininity, and both were celebrated. Some later thinkers criticized such approaches as essentialist. The question of whether a mother is born or made was further problematized when it was suggested that socialization, rather than anatomy, gives women the capacity to mother.

Ascribing Importance to the Mother

The marginalization of mothers in psychoanalytic theory stood in stark opposition to clinical experience. During the 1940s Object Relations tradition, the British Independent school and Attachment Theory shifted the focus from the father to the mother. While diverse, these theories shared the view that early relations with the mother and her body set the basic structures of the psyche and provided a template for later relationships. Donald Winnicott argued that even during pregnancy, the “good enough” mother is already preoccupied with her inborn, making space in her mind for the baby. Maternal ambivalence and hate were articulated as integral parts of the emotional repertoire a mother might feel toward her children.

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