Censorship of the Woman-As-Lover

Michel Fain (1971) elaborated this concept in his article “Prelude to fantasy life”. It was developed and deepened with Denise Braunschweig throughout their joint work.

“The censorship of the woman-as-lover is the censorship introduced by the mother of the child when part of her erotic libido refuses to be a mother” (Fain, 1971, p. 292). This censorship is exercised when the mother suspends her role as a mother to resume her role as a woman. At this point, she decathects her child in favour of a third who can be the object of her fantasy. The mother's capacity to share herself between her baby and her other cathexes creates the necessary conditions for the child's symbolic capacity and serves as the basis of oedipal organisation.

The analyst heard a knock at the door, and opened it. There was nobody there! It was systematic. This patient, hidden in the hallway, always appeared with a slight delay. This ritual seemed more like a game of “Hello, it's me!” than the expression of a neurotic discomfort related to the oedipal fantasy of the primal scene with the intention of disturbing it. What did she fear? “I'm so boring,” she said, “that I'm always surprised you're there”.

She had come for a consultation in connection with somatic symptoms: asthma and eczema. She was the daughter of parents who had separated very early on and, for her, the couple did not exist. She was desperately and hatefully attached to a mother described as distant, always ready to abandon her. “She preferred working,” she said, “to caring for her daughter.” Now that she was a mother herself, how could she escape the fate of this identification that would turn her, too, into a ‘bad mother’?’’ To prevent this misfortune, she established a fusional relationship with her baby. This was the only means she had of maintaining a “good maternal image” of herself. She could not leave her daughter day or night, keeping an eye on her as she slept. The baby's insomnia worried her, but reassured her at the same ti