In Her Mother's Voice: Reflections on “Femininity” and the Superego

For some female analysands the anxiety generated by superego conflict stimulated by aggressive and creative wishes may be warded off by invoking representations of the archaic all-powerful, limit-setting mother. To understand this clinical phenomenon in terms of a specific kind of female superego vulnerability is to miss the possibility that the fantasy of being mother's good little girl may be employed in the service of concealing the analysand's wishes and capacity for creative and destructive power. In the analytic hour we see transformed aspects of the analysand's past that are useful to the mind in its current operations. Representations of the mother and the archaic maternal imago are neither reflections of the past as it was, nor are they monolithic. These maternal representations may reverberate with adult memories of the past, but that remembered experience is a constructed one, constructed to serve particular mental operations. As these apparently remembered constructions arise in the current hour we need to remember that the present is the present, with its immediate desires and conflicts that the mind is attempting to represent. The past as it appears in the present is a new creation and, like the transference, a mutual creation of the analysand with her analyst.