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This volume, edited by Paola Mariotti, focuses on central aspects of the mothering experience: how a woman arrives at wanting or not wanting to have children and how psychic factors rooted in early experience foster or hinder mothering desires, choices, and capabilities. It contains fourteen articles by prominent psychoanalysts, of which all but three have been published previously.
Compiling these articles into one volume allows the reader to see clearly the major patterns, ideas, and established knowledge that have emerged in psychoanalytic writing on this subject over the last sixty years. In an introduction and overview, Mariotti points to three organizing themes: first, the meaning and desire to be a mother start in the bodily and affective exchanges between a female infant and her mother; second, the psychic manifestations of maternality are organized through identifications with a maternal image, in a transgenerational lineage; third, maternality is also the expression of multilayered wishes structured in the oedipal period. These points are all the more convincing as they emerge repeatedly and with a variety of compelling clinical evidence, from psychoanalysis, to emergency interventions with women suffering from postpartum depression, to infant-child psychotherapy.
The book is divided into three major parts. The first is devoted to the general dynamics and development of the experience of mothering. The book begins appropriately with a little gem by Winnicott on “primary maternal preoccupation,” a special state lasting but a few weeks after delivery but necessary for the functioning of a “good enough environment” for the infant. (I would argue that this special hyperattention on the infant should and does last longer than the few weeks that Winnicott suggests.) There follows a very well written chapter by Dana Birksted-Breen, who argues that pregnancy facilities psychoanalysis, as it stirs up unconscious fantasies and offers the opportunity to reorganize defe