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Psychoanalysis, whether it posits in the beginning maternal presence or absence, has yet to develop a story of the mother as other than the object of the infant's desire or the matrix from which he or she develops an infant subjectivity. The mother herself as speaking subject, as author, is missing from these dramas. (Garner, Kahane, and Sprengnether , 25)
For the first psychoanalyst, the “navel” of psychic development is identification with the mother. It is “unknown” to him not because it is unknowable but because he is a man, because manhood as patriarchal culture creates it depends on denying, in myriad ways, the powerful ambivalence that the mother inspires. (Kahn 1985, 88)
The notion that another tragedy of motherhood may lie in the conflict between the mother's desire for self-realization—a self-realization that has nothing to do with her being a mother—and the child's need for her selflessness seems never to have entered the psychoanalyst's mind.… It is as if, for psychoanalysis, the only self worth worrying about in the mother-child relationship were that of the child. (Suleiman 1985, 355-56)
[E]ach of us enters the world through the body of a woman—a carnal enigma that has virtually baffled our systems of understanding. Rather than felling, condemning, or idealizing the body of the (m)other, we need to recognize her in ourselves. (Sprengnether 1990, 245-46)