Chapter 5 On Motherhood

In working with mothers’ responses to the total or partial loss of their child, it becomes evident that, at one level, they experience such a loss as an injury to the integrity of their body ego, which includes the child. Their capacity to invest the child as a bodily part of themselves as well as to release him and transfer bodily ownership to him in the course of personality growth necessitates flexible body boundaries. This characteristic of the female body ego is both gratifying and threatening to the mother as well as to others. It also has a profound impact on the growing boy's and girl's attempts to differentiate themselves from the mother bodily and to delineate their own sex-specific body ego. The nature and outcome of this difficult process has a significant effect on women's and men's attitudes to motherhood. These attitudes contain many defensive measures against the primitive anxieties of this early level, contributing perhaps also to the frequent neglect of motherhood in theories of female psychology.

I shall focus on an aspect of female psychology that has been sidestepped, more often than not, in analytic contributions to this topic, namely the fact that the potential for being a mother and its realization, or lack thereof, forms the genetic core of womanhood and plays a crucial role in the development of boys and girls from the very start. The widespread neglect of the central role of motherhood - exemplified, for example, by Tyson's (1994) review of contemporary contributions to female psychology - is in striking contrast to our clinical experience which has shown us that: the female and male body ego develop by differentiation from that of a

mother (not just a woman); girls and boys perceive their mother as a mother first and only later as a woman; their mother (in her mothering rather than womanly function) is their first object of identification; little girls want to be a “Mommy” long before they want to be a “lady” and refer to their doll as