Beyond Sentimentality in the Mother-Son Dyad: A Psychoanalytic Reconsideration of Cultural Myths from India

Affective and emotional experiences are inherently relational in nature. They stem from our relationships with others. These relational experiences are processed by us as we are continuously constituted through these experiences. One such relational context in which all affective and felt experiences are literally born, is that of mother and child. Winnicott proposed: “There is no such thing as a baby…..if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone” (Winnicott, 1942, p.179). Here he asserts that life shapes us through relations with others, usually and foremost early on through relations of love and dependency with a (m)other. Early identifications with mother, or aspects of her, are the way in which the human subject and psychic reality first come into being. Melanie Klein stated that object relations are the centre of emotional life.

Nowhere, except for in psychoanalysis, are the feeling and emotional worlds of people given a primacy, attended to and understood as simultaneously personal and relational, involving body and cultural-historical-political context. Relational psychoanalysis1, particularly, yields an understanding of the self as the locus of the passions of love and hate, envy and rage, guilt and concern. It sees the inner world constituted by “internal objects”, which are amalgamation of felt affects, phantasies, stored memories, collected impressions vis-a-vis significant others, constructed through experience - mediated and shaped by bodily needs, anxieties, defenses and developmental capacities. These internal objects help to structure modes of relating with the self and with external others. It is in the intersubjective encounter between the child and the significant others that the child develops feelings of who it is, can and cannot be.

Klinian theory gave primacy to the mother in the child's - and thus, the adult's - mental life. Throughout the world, the mother is taken as the central figure in the life of