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For a dozen years of my adulthood, and after having my own children, I worked as a film censor, refracting screen images through my own psychological prism in order to judge and understand their social meaning. As a consequence, my mind is littered - seared - with unbidden and unwanted images which lurch sometimes painfully from their hiding-places. One such imprint is a nasty little film called Mother's Day. In this, a cackling spider-mother sits in her nest in the middle of a woods-web from which she sends her two dumb sons out to rape, mutilate and torture passers-by. They bring back stories of their murderous exploits to excite her, sometimes bringing the victims, too, as thrilling live entertainment: sadism on stage. Wicked they are, evil she is, but she loves her sons. Compare this with the Virgin Mary, passive receptacle for Godseed, woman shriven of her own desire, portrayed ubiquitously as unalloyed love, the Madonna-and-child, infinite fidelity - and she loves her son, too. The one image a perversion of maternity, the other an ideal - and an ideal uncorrupted by maternal hatred. Rozsika Parker, in this provocative and enthralling book, treads carefully but resolutely down a path whose shape is frequently differently mapped from the shape she discovers as she explores maternal ambivalence. Methodically - but never pedantically - she addresses the discourse of the mentors of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic world, considering their view of what constitutes good-enough mothering and taking issue with those who would argue that maternal ambivalence is inevitably pathogenic. She points to the dynamic thrust of much psychoanalytic thinking whose focus is the child, from Winnicott's baby with her environmental mother, to Mahler's toddler taking her first teetering steps away as she separates and individuates.
Parker performs an enriching volte-face as she contemplates the phenomenon of the discomfiting coexistence of love and hate of her baby from the mother's