Analysis of a Narcissistic Wound: Reflections on André Green's The Dead Mother*

André Green's (1986) concept of the dead mother, a mother who is present in body but absent in soul, has been very meaningful to me personally. Having been raised in a Kibbutz

where mothers were physically absent most of the time (parents were allowed only three hours a day with their children and often did not have even that much time with them), I often experienced feelings of longing for an absent mother.

In reading Green's paper, “The Dead Mother” (1986), I felt his concept might apply to a wider scope of experience than that of a sudden loss of the mother's emotional connection. The early narcissistic wound Green describes can also be observed in patients with narcissistic mothers who were depressed throughout the patient's childhood or were otherwise consumed by life away from their children (as in the kibbutz). Further, I wondered if this wound is also inflicted when there is a complete absence of symbiotic attachment. Green's dead mother complex has provided me with an new way of thinking about some patients, perhaps a new explanatory tool.

Green (1986) describes a dynamic that analysts encounter with patients who, in their infancy, have experienced a sudden loss of their mother's affection and emotional connection. The mother, Green argues, even though she is physically present, becomes emotionally dead to the child. Such a psychic situation, according to Green, might cause a narcissistic wound to the child's ego, leaving him forever consumed by his bereavement (p. 159). This kind of wound, Green tells us, “plays a formative role in the organization of [the child's] psyche” (p. 143). And since any wound is the result of destructiveness inflicted upon the child, the child's anxiety that accompanies the wound is destructive as well, bearing “the colors of mourning: black or white [blanc, the translator explains in a note, can also mean blank]. Black as in severe depression, or blank as in states of