Part One: Mothering in Body and Mind

Approaching the various aspects of maternality explored in the first part of this book requires some considerations of female development in its specificity. As we have seen, Freud (1933) did not seem confident and satisfied with his own conclusions, which he described as ‘certainly incomplete and fragmentary’ (p. 135). However, some of his followers in the first half of the twentieth century had no hesitation in postulating a connection between female development, masochism and passivity:

In the reproductive functions proper - menstruation, defloration, pregnancy and parturition - woman is biologically doomed to suffer. Nature seems to have no hesitation in administering to her strong doses of pain, and she can do nothing but submit passively to the regimen prescribed.

Helene Deutsch (1945), in her two-volume The Psychology of Women, embraced Freud’s theories: the importance of penis envy in the little girl’s early development, masochism as a major element in women’s erotic pleasure, the role of passivity all concord with Freud’s views. But in the section on motherhood, especially in her clinical material, a more nuanced understanding emerges - for instance, the desire for a child is not seen as a replacement for the penis. In Deutsch

a woman comes into her own with motherhood, and to motherhood her sexuality is submitted.

In discussing the early development of maternal feelings in the little girl, Judith Kestenberg proposed a sophisticated connection between the young child’s discovery of undefined vaginal (and genital) sensations, and her desire for a baby (or attachment to a doll). She suggested that early undischarged and confusing vaginal excitations were the basic source of the girl’s wish for a child:

The most powerful source of the girl’s maternal interest, however, is the projection of the vaginal sensations upon the baby, and the equation of the inside of the body with the baby.... The baby doll which can be carried around everyw