The Repression of the Bad Oedipal Mother in Psychoanalysis

Despite the disagreeable cliché that psychoanalysis is a mother bashing theory, the mother has been a latecomer to the field. Till the end, the Freudian theory did remain father centered and paternal. Freud, who knew the castrating mother very well, didn’t give the mother a central place in his theory, and didn’t feel this absence was worthy of elaboration. It was Abraham who introduced the concept of the “bad mother” when he was working with Freud, and later as Klein’s analyst influenced her return to the mother as the most important object in the child’s encounter with the world. Yet, Klein’s notion of mother remained as a phantasy object in the child’s internal world of object relationships. Even Winnicott who seems to be concerned with the external mother in the environment, is concerned primarily with the pre-oedipal mother in relation to the infant. The Oedipal mother of the later years who may actively become the subject of seduction, rivalry, and envy in her relationship with her daughter or son is only seen in case reports, but rarely in psychoanalytic theorizing. It seems safer to talk about the absence of a good mother rather than about the presence of a bad mother. Bad mother is a concept that should be inferred rather than presented. This apparent anomaly is explored here through the review of Volver , Pedro Almodó var’s