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André Green’s paper ‘The dead mother’ (Green, 1983) can be used as a paradigm of the child’s response to a traumatic disruption of maternal relatedness in infancy and early childhood. This paper therefore raises certain fundamental epistemological questions regarding the reconstruction of the past, and the relation between trauma in infancy and early childhood and subsequent psychopathology. The dead mother syndrome can therefore be seen as a model that illuminates some elemental issues that are germane to both the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. It is a base from which we can explore the epistemology of trauma and the problem of reconstruction.
It may be useful to distinguish the dead mother syndrome from the dead mother complex. The term dead mother syndrome can be used to denote the intensely malignant clinical syndrome that Green described when there is a primary identification with the emotionally dead mother whereas the term dead mother complex denotes an entire range of an individual’s response to a chronically depressed, emotionally absent mother. For example, Guntrip—in his well-known paper ‘My experience of analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott’—reports that he reconstructed with Winnicott his experience of a depressed and emotionally unrelated mother but he himself did not suffer from the dead mother syndrome (Guntrip, 1975). He suffered from a dead mother complex which in his case did not lead to emotional deadness (an identification with this mother) but to a hypersensitivity to schizoid states of withdrawal in others. To put the matter simply: everyone with a dead mother complex does not develop a dead mother syndrome. A mother’s affective withdrawal from her infant and young child is a relatively common occurrence, whereas the dead mother syndrome, that bespeaks severe psychopathology, is quite rare. The variability of an individual’s response to an emotionally absent mother illustrates the importance of a selective process within the individual