General Introduction

A mother’s love for the infant she suckles and cares for is something far more profound than her later affection for the growing child. It is in the nature of a completely satisfying love-relation, which not only fulfils every mental wish but also every physical need.

Why would a woman want children? And how and when does the wish for a child begin? What does it mean to a woman to ‘become a mother’? Maternity is an experience of body and of mind in equal measure, consciously experienced but also resting on unconscious beliefs, expectations and anxieties. Life events can greatly influence it, but, as we shall see, it is rooted in early infancy, in the first exchanges with the mother interwoven with the early Oedipal vicissitudes.

Clinical papers in psychoanalysis refer almost invariably to the patient’s mother who often occupies a prominent place. The mother who is being discussed is the mother brought by the patient into the consulting room and this figure can be seen at two levels. First, she is the image that inhabits the patient’s psychic life, and the analyst directs her interpretative work to this level. Gradually, however, the patient becomes able to think about his mother as a person with a specific complex personality, who has had an impact on his growth and development. She acquires depth and so does the patient’s relationship with her. Some snippets of her history, some vignettes from

the past emerge, indicating some aspects of her life that the patient cannot at first integrate. For example, the mother who loved homemade cakes with abandon: ‘disgusting’, said the patient; or the mother who, when her infant had a cold, put him in his pram and walked for hours in a snow blizzard to get to the doctor - eventually the child developed pneumonia: wasn’t his mother wonderful, asks the son. The capacity for pleasure is introduced in the analysis by the first patient, whereas a self-sacrificing murderou