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The paper discusses the difficulty in psychoanalytic literature of the interpretation of female desire. Indeed, the focus is either on woman or mother, always taken singly, avoiding integration
Dr. Zanardi is Adjunct Professor of Psychology, New York University; Professor of Psychology, University of Milan, Italy; and a member of the Psychoanalytic Studies Association, Milan, Italy.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fourth International Conference of the Psychoanalytic Society of New York University Postdoctoral Program, August 1997, Florence, Italy.
of womanself-subject and motherself-object. The difficulty in understanding female desire, which includes the maternal, could be related to the complexity of the maternal interpretation, connected for both men and women, to the traumatic memory of the primary separation from the mother's body—birth.
My hypothesis is that the birth memory, remaining inscribed in the body, is either expressed by the omnipotent mother fantasy or projected by both sexes on the female, the mother body, which becomes objectified in the culture. The fantasy of maternal omnipotence—idealization of the mother and objectification of the female body—devaluation of the maternal body, could both represent a defense against human impotence in the face of the mystery of life.
In light of this hypothesis, the paper considers the difficulty for the girl, who inherits the transmission of the maternal, in expressing and, at the same time, representing in her life the anxiety derived from the birth process. Women will always fluctuate, caught in the impossibility of an integration of the two parts of themselves: an acquired subjectivity and the “idealized” and “objectified” motherself.