Changing Conceptions of The Good Mother in Psychoanalysis

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.

There have always been mothers, but the concept of the good mother is continually reinvented. Each age and each society defines her anew, in its own terms, with its own restrictions and expectations. Today, the value of expressing love for one's offspring is axiomatic; it has achieved the status of a moral imperative. Though some would hold that the loving parent need not be the biological mother and may even be an institution, such as daycare, it is a fundamental contemporary belief that children need the continuous and exclusive presence of good parents (or substitutes) and that anything that separates children from their loving caretakers is destructive.

Present-day psychoanalytic practitioners would support the importance of good mothering. Most feel that the infant's early relation to its mother profoundly affects its sense of self, its later object relationships, and adjustment in general. Steeped as psychoanalyti-cally oriented therapists are in the concepts of “attachment,” “bonding,” “ordinary devotion,” and “mirroring,” they would be hard pressed to imagine a psychoanalytic theory where the effects of mothering were inconsequential. In view of the recent emphasis, it is easy to forget that mothering was not always an issue of substance to psychoanalysts. In fact the prominence of the mother in theory has evolved over time and continues to evolve.

Moreover, psychoanalytic theory is essentially child centered —the empathic thrust favors the predicament of the child, not the