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In the preface of Ellen Toronto’s Maternal Subjectivity (2023), she shares maternally-themed personal stories of painful intergenerationally transmitted trauma that confirm and set the tone of the maternal as the realm of grief and existential vulnerability. The stories of suffering in her maternal lineage from unacknowledged and untreated mental illness cut open Toronto’s demonstration of maternal subjectivity as an existential project about mystery, displacement, vulnerability, and our relationship to Other. The raw story that Toronto shares about her own mother’s “maternal madness,” viscerally present yet unarticulated in her upbringing, reflects the tender and authentic reading experience of Maternal Subjectivity. With this honesty, it avoids being dominated by the dissociative effect of theory absent lived experience.
Toronto’s premise is a bold one. She rejects the projective fantasy of normative stable maternal development that is untouched by trauma and its destabilizing of the self. Toronto explores the intersection between traumatic self-states and maternal subjectivity in light of the collective backdrop of the male body as prototype; and how that impacts the experience of becoming and being a maternal body and subject. Her conclusion is that maternal subjectivity is a dissociated self-state, and that this continued “absent-presence” defines and sustains the patriarchal structure.
Toronto engages concepts like Bollas’ unthought known (1987), Stern’s unformulated experience (1997), Ogden’s (1992) primitive edge of experience, and Green’s private madness (1996), from a matricentric perspective. With the dimension that this matricentric perspective
offers, Toronto proposes that Green’s description of “normal maternal madness” is a dissociated state, although so common that it seems “normal.” While reading Toronto’s critical analysis, I was intrigued that psychoanalytic thinkers (who are, incidentally, male) like Stern, Ogden, and Green, have described the m