You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As recently as the 1980s, sexual perversion was not thought to occur in women. From Freud onwards, the broad consensus held that, not having a penis, women were not capable of such behaviour. That a mother might harm her child was for the most part unthinkable. And this remains a deeply unsettling subject, and one that as a society we have preferred not to look at too closely. But that sense of aversion, while symptomatic of the problem, has restricted our understanding of patients in this group, impacting on policy-making and the allocation of treatment to those suffering from illnesses of this nature.
It is now more than thirty years since Estella Welldon’s landmark study of female perversion, Mother, Madonna, Whore, was first published. Angela Foster’s insightful collection of essays, Mothers Accused and Abused, is both a celebration of Welldon’s work, and an account of how today’s practitioners have built on her achievement. The essays bring together the range of current approaches to the treatment of perversion in women, and in particular, perversion of the maternal instinct, setting out the psychoanalytic understanding of these patients, and how that understanding has been applied in the fields of mental health, social services, criminal justice and the family courts.
The authors collected here, including many leading lights of psychoanalysis, forensic psychiatry and the law, attest to the lasting influence of Welldon’s work, while mapping out how the land currently lies in terms of the services available to women with these problems. They set out markers for the work still be done, while pointing to the huge gaps in the provision of treatment that still exist.
When a child is removed from her mother’s care, any support the mother had been receiving is usually terminated immediately. As two contributors, the forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead and the clinical psychologist Anna Williams note, mothers who have abused their children are seen as too risky for outpati