“Ruthlessness Gives Way To Ruth”: Mothering And Mourning In Marilynne Robinson'S Housekeeping

This interpretation of Marilynne Robinson's (1982) novel, Housekeeping, is intended to introduce an extraordinary American literary text to those in the psychoanalytic community who may not yet know it. I will show how this novel enacts certain analytic and therapeutic motifs and, more particularly, exemplifies a number of D. W. Winnicott's central themes and preoccupations. Long recognized as a pioneer and popularizer of object relations in Britain, Winnicott has also become influential in the United States in recent decades. Combining outstanding clinical skills and a clear, elegant prose style, Winnicott was a prime mover in the major shift in focus and emphasis in psychoanalytic treatment and theory on both sides of the Atlantic after Freud, from the triadic oedipal period dominated by the father to the dyadic preoedipal interactions between the infant and its primary caretaker, usually the mother. He contended that disturbances in this early contact between mother and child-in the provision of what he famously called “good-enough mothering”-can have consequences even more dire for the developing psyche than those arising during the later oedipal period. In discussing the attempts to repair, in the therapeutic setting, damage wrought at this very early age, Winnicott stresses the psychoanalyst's quasi-mothering role, that is, the function of holding and nurturing in the psychoanalytic process and the provision of the requisite space in which the analysand may grow and finally attain a genuinely independent, “truer” self than the adaptive, compliant one that tends to be adopted by the inadequately cared-for child. Throughout Winnicott's work, there runs the