Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

On this account, the cultural expectation that we should separate from the mother creates particular difficulties for daughters, because they must also remain identified with their mothers and with the maternal body to assume a female identity. As a result, girls typically end up split between conscious repudiation of their mothers and a kind of unconscious mergence with them.

Nonetheless, this striving takes place against the background of the peculiar psychical difficulties that daughters face in our culture. Drawing upon psychoanalytic feminism, I explore some unconscious dynamics involved in mothering a daughter. Some research suggests that typically mothers respond to their daughters with special ambivalence: This constellation of feelings repro- duces the ambivalence with which the mother, as a daughter, came to relate to her own mother.

Now, as Roszika Parker [], has shown, maternal ambivalence need not be merely negative and destructive but can be a creative and constructive force, at least if mothers can acknowledge and harness it. Experiencing the conjunction of hatred and love, and of impulses to separate and to merge, can motivate mothers to try to integrate these forces into an enriched, more open mental struc- ture.

Ambivalence, then, is a powerful force propelling mothers towards a distinctly maternal subject-position, in which they make mean- ing from the re-animated maternal past. In Chapter 6 I focus on the temporal structures that organize how the mother replays her maternal past. In doing so, she is remembering that past. She does so primarily at an affective, bodily, and habitual level, by re-enacting patterns of behavior and affective response that once circulated between herself and her own mother.

These modes of maternal remem- bering generate a particular form of lived time—maternal time—that is cyclical, centering on the regular reappearance of an archaic past that cuts across time as a linear succession of moments. This ensures that the mother can only remember her maternal past in the light of this novel present, a present that bestows upon the past new meanings that it did not originally have.

The maternal past returns, but never simply as it was. This leads me to the theme of Chapter 7: In particular, the mother confronts the loss of her own maternal past. Because she can relive and regain that past only in a new shape, her relation with her child embodies the reality that her past as it was, and her own mother as she once was, are irrecoverably lost.

Moreover, the mother faces the painful prospect of losing her maternal past all the more as her child becomes a differentiated being and as the mother thereby gradually loses the bodily intimacy with that child within which her own maternal past had been re-created albeit in new and different form. How- ever, the cultural expectation that children should separate from their mothers exacerbates the pain of this process for mothers. If instead it were widely recognized that children can differentiate without having to sepa- rate, then mothers could anticipate their relationships with their children continuing even whilst their children grow up and away.

Mothers would still face the loss of their initial body-to-body intimacy with their children, but this loss would be less acute than it is now. This would make maternal loss more manageable, and this would make mothers better able to let their children grow up. We must also fi nd. These include Freudian and Lacanian traditions of thought about the paternal function; psychoanalytic ideas about the good-enough mother; the rise of ideals of intensive mother- ing in the late twentieth century; and recent fictional and autobiographi- cal writing by or about mothers.

I shall also address some objections that might be raised against my approach to maternal subjectivity. Arguably, this has been the case from the beginnings of this civilization in ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian tradition through to the present day. The maternal body has repeatedly been interpreted as the background, environment, fi rst home and container, which everyone must leave behind to become a self.

Tradi- tionally, this was a self in the sense of a full participant in the community and its organizing spiritual, political, or cultural values. Where it has been upheld, this requirement to separate from the mother has been taken to apply to girls and boys alike. Yet girls must in some sense also remain identified with their mothers and the maternal body so as to assume a female identity. Consequently, female selfhood and, in modern times, female subjectivity have been problematic.

The same set of entrenched assumptions about the self has made maternal selfhood and Stone Final page proof. However, despite this hetero- geneity, we can identify certain influential strands and traditions within this civilization and can trace the hold they have had on our collective imagination. On this view, the whole field of maternal body relations was tainted by sin; by implication, spiritual value required transcendence of this field. Partly due to institutional support of this kind, and partly for psychological reasons see Chapter 2 , ideas about the need to leave the mother behind have had marked influence on our culture.

It may be objected that no philosophers or major theorists explicitly argue that selfhood requires a break from the maternal body, so that I am criticizing views that nobody has ever endorsed at a reflective level. However, my target is not so much philosophical theories of the self as prevailing assumptions that, I believe, have been embodied in our forms of social life—our social imaginary, at least its dominant strands on this concept see Gatens and Lloyd , Taylor These assumptions have had wide currency even though few philosophers have explicitly defended corresponding views of the self.

Moreover, it may be argued—as Iriga- ray amongst others does—that many canonical Western philosophers have implicitly imagined the self in opposition to the maternal body even if they have not so theorized it, and that this imagining shapes their writings. We are dealing, then, with assumptions and imagery: Within this web, the mother is a bodily figure who conjures up intense affects.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity - CRC Press Book

She is seen as the figure whom one must leave behind, and hence she is assumed to be the background to the selfhood of others but not herself a self or in modernity a subject. In another variation on these themes, the mother is dangerous, threatening to hold us back from selfhood, to prevent us from leaving her behind.

It may now be objected that these assumptions are rather vaguely speci- fied, and if that we look at any particular forms under which they have been held, we encounter ideas too various to be appropriately treated as a unity. Certainly, I will be discussing a wide range of ideas about the need to break away from the mother discussions that will hopefully give substance to my Stone Final page proof. These ideas include the ancient Greek view, articulated by Aeschylus in his Oresteia, that one must detach oneself from the mother to become a self qua member or citizen of the polis.

The Gospels suggest that one must distance oneself from the mother to become a self qua member of the spiritual community. In the twentieth century some theorists have explicitly affirmed the requirement to break from the mother—above all psychoanalysts, including Freud and Lacan. The expectation that we should separate, then, has been expressed under a series of changing interpretations, corresponding to changing interpretations of the self.

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Yet, varied as these forms are, we can identify them as strands of a single history. To be sure, psychoanalysis has also spearheaded the recognition, increas- ingly widespread in the twentieth century, that our early relations with our mothers are central in forming our selves. Often, though, it has been thought that our mothers lay the foundations of our selves or of capacities for subjectivity which nonetheless require a break from the mother for their complete realization or exercise. But because the mother embodies this transition, it has still tended to be thought that full entry into culture and civilization requires us to leave behind the mother and her transitional realm.

Its main character, Ada, has for no known reason been mute since she was six. When the story begins, her father has arranged her marriage to a man in New Zealand. Thus, Ada remains within the pre-verbal realms of bodily gesture and of pure affec- tive expression, realms proper to Ada as a mother—as is indicated by the contrast with Flora her daughter, who can speak directly to others. The Stone Final page proof. But perhaps The Piano over-dramatizes this antithesis. Surely in gen- eral mothers can and do speak?

The question, though, is whether mothers can speak in ways that articulate their particular position within mater- nal body relations, and can create linguistic forms and narrative structures that provide this articulation. Is there available to mothers any distinctly maternal speaking position? Anne Enright asks this question. Or is it just. I suspect, as I search the room for the hunger. Or the precise place where stories start. How else can I explain the shift from language that has happened in my brain?

This is why mothers do not write, because motherhood happens in the body, as much as the mind. A child came out of me. I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing. Enright , 47 Grappling with the same antithesis of subjectivity and maternity, several contemporary novels depict mothers who lose their subjectivity on becom- ing mothers and regain it only by losing their children.

As Gill Rye explores in her study of narratives of mothering in contemporary France, the per- vasive theme in these narratives is not happiness but loss: In this novel, an unnamed mother takes her daughter with her as she runs off to the Basque coast, leaving her husband, home, and job. A detective, hired by the husband who wants his daughter back, traces the mother and daugh- ter.

Instead a watching ice-cream vendor describes the handover of the girl: Off they go, the two of them. There was a kiss, a handshake, the woman is still here; her sorbet drips on to the ground in pink splodges. She comes to life now, says goodbye to him, and walks off, throwing her cornet into a wastebin. Darrieussecq [] , As far as we know, the mother is willing to relinquish her daughter and she emigrates with no apparent plans to remain in contact. In terms of the narrative, the handover of the daughter marks the end of the emo- tional crisis through which the mother has been passing, which implies that the mother accepts with relief, or at least submits to, the handover of her daughter.

She felt submerged in a kind of psychical fusion with her daughter. We see this in the first chapter in which the two run away and camp overnight by the sea. Pausing to buy provisions at a super- market and leaving her daughter in the car, the mother daydreams: The mother yearns to escape.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Likewise, during the night, while the daughter sleeps in the tent, the mother runs off to look at the sea, which at this point symbolizes freedom, mental space, and privacy. The daughter then wakes up, afraid, and goes looking for her mother, so that when the mother returns to the empty tent: She was only going to look at the sea.

And then she saw her, an elf.

She caught her, that fragile little body ready to melt in the night air. Self- less mergence in maternal body relations versus individual selfhood pred- icated on the rejection of those relations; the mother is caught between these alternatives. Rachel Cusk experiences the same dilemma. Its constituents, resolutely hostile, are equally unruly. To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other.

Cusk , 57 We remember how Cusk described her exhaustion as a new mother: Cusk , Maternity, for Cusk, is disfigurement: The mother has sunk into an archaic field in which body parts and functions exchange places with and permeate one another—the field of early mother—child flux and interchange. These are felt to be under threat, compromised, or recoverable only with difficulty and at the expense of other, newly acquired dimensions of life as a mother.

The abilities that are threatened here may seem disparate, but they are connected by virtue of the modern conception of the subject. The subject is one who actively gives meaning to his or her experience in speech, writing, or other modes , and who can do so only because at some level he or she identifies as the single agent performing this activity. This picture of mothering may seem one-sided and unduly negative. These aspects are attractive to mothers and, often, cause them difficulty. This difficulty, though, is largely an artifact Stone Final page proof.

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Arguably, these mothers are unusual amongst women in that they are used to being treated as autonomous individuals, and so, too, in fi nding this status undermined when they become mothers. However, mothers of many different social backgrounds tend to experience some difficulty in reconciling their mater- nity with a sense of autonomous selfhood for evidence, see Oakley , Even if these difficulties are most pronounced for contemporary middle-class mothers, this is because these mothers have had privileged access to the modern position of autonomous subject.

Their difficulties therefore do manifest and illustrate broader tensions between modern ide- als of subjectivity and the nature of maternity. But why have these tensions not been dissolved or reduced by the circum- stances of contemporary mothering? Today in the West, few women leave the paid workforce altogether on becoming mothers; they usually continue with paid work and professional life, in which, moreover, women now par- ticipate much more extensively than they did a generation ago.

Men tend to be more involved with their children and families than they used to be, and many Western countries give these arrangements some support through schemes of maternity and paternity leave and childcare provision.

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Why, then, would mothers continue to experience the transition to maternity in terms of a loss of self and autonomy? Part of the answer is that it remains very largely women and not men who are the principal child-carers. In the majority of families moth- ers retain the primary responsibility for children, and paid child-carers remain almost entirely female.

Mothers may now participate more fully in paid work outside the home, but in most households family care has not become equally shared between women and men. Mothers are increasingly expected to devote themselves exclusively to their children—at the same time that fewer mothers are in a position to fulfi ll this expectation. As Caroline Gatrell observes: Gatrell , 61 These standards are promoted by the parenting industry: This industry encompasses the myriad advice manuals and pamphlets, radio and televi- sion programs and websites, and now parenting classes, all directed towards parents and administered by professionals.

Winnicott has not always been popular with feminists, because his propagation of this ideal fed into efforts following the Second World War to return women to the home. This is particularly because Winnicott makes mothering much more demanding, and by implication time- and energy-consuming, than it had previously been taken to be.

The good-enough mother thereby allows the baby gradually to come to grasp and accept the difference between its fantasies and reality, and to experience itself to be separate from its mother. There are ambiguities in the concept of the good-enough mother which shed light on the power relations between mothers and parenting experts.

However, Winnicott takes it that this kind of mother acts instinctively, not from rational principles Segal , 4. Specifically, she acts from her unconscious, and it is precisely by doing so that she can assist her child towards gradual individuation. Her hatred prompts the mother to withdraw from her child. Rather, if the mother can tolerate and accept her hateful feelings, then, as her child separates from her, she can instinctively draw on these hateful feelings to allow her to accept this separation.

She is therefore good because she is good enough, not perfect—because she Stone Final page proof. Thus, although Winnicott aimed merely to describe everyday mothering practice and not to prescribe to mothers, his ideal becomes one to which mothers aspire and by which they measure and judge themselves and one another. Yet his work provides a major intellectual founda- tion for that industry.

This industry more broadly is a characteristic product of the form of power distinctive of modernity—disciplinary power, Foucault tells us This form of power operates not primarily by the prohibition of some defi nite and fi nite range of acts, but rather by normalization: There are developmental standards that all children are expected to reach Beck and Beck-Gernsheim [] , Examinations generate bodies of knowledge about individuals, ranking them by their distance from ideal norms.

Much of the knowledge produced by infancy researchers, for instance by the attachment theorists Ainsworth et al. Ainsworth and her co-workers rank mothers by their greater or lesser capacity to foster strong attachments in their children. Here differences amongst mothers count only as deviations from the norm. Learn More about VitalSource Bookshelf. CPD consists of any educational activity which helps to maintain and develop knowledge, problem-solving, and technical skills with the aim to provide better health care through higher standards.

It could be through conference attendance, group discussion or directed reading to name just a few examples. We provide a free online form to document your learning and a certificate for your records. Already read this title? Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. Exclusive web offer for individuals. Home Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity. Add to Wish List. Toggle navigation Additional Book Information. Description Table of Contents Author s Bio. Summary In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity.

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