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‘It was only the other day when I read Freud for the first time that I discovered that this violently disturbing conflict between love and hate is a common feeling and called ambivalence,’ wrote Virginia Woolf (1941). Her words indicate a crucial feature of ambivalence. There is both the ‘violently disturbing’ experience itself and the distress engendered by detecting the affect and the owning - or disowning - of the conflict. Woolf ’s words indicate a measure of relief that she is not alone in suffering ambivalence; it's ‘a common feeling’ with a name. There is something inimical about ambivalence and to none more so than to mothers.
In my work on maternal ambivalence I have, nevertheless, claimed a creative role for manageable maternal ambivalence, suggesting that it is in the very anguish of maternal ambivalence that fruitfulness for mothers and children can reside (Parker 1995). The crucial issue is how a mother manages the anxiety that ambivalence provokes. Here I shall begin by mapping the specificities of maternal ambivalence and then, following a case history, explore the role of shame in rendering ambivalence unmanageable.
Freud (1915) himself betrays a certain ambivalence towards ambivalence. In 1915 he wrote of the creative potential of ambivalence, observing that ‘it is indeed foreign to our intelligence as well as to our feelings to couple love and hate: but Nature, by making use of this pair of opposites, contrives to keep love ever vigilant and fresh, so as to guard against the hate which lurks behind it’ (p. 299). Despite this passionate acknowledgement of the inevitability and positive purpose of ambivalence, by 1931 his negative conclusion
was that ambivalence was an ‘archaic inheritance’ to be grown out of: ‘Normal adults do undoubtedly succeed in separating those two attitudes from each other, and do not find themselves obliged to hate their love-objects’ (p. 235).
Perhaps the best-known text on maternal ambivalence is D. W. Winnicott's (1949) ‘Ha