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The relationships woven between parents and children are bound to pay tribute to their own past: the multitude of conscious and unconscious desires, crystallized as fantasies, is being reactivated once the baby arrives. As with every psychic event, the alchemy of the new set of identifications towards which the adult psychic is being led within the parenthood process will not be able to be either conflict free or ambivalence free. The Death drive and the Life drive are intertwining — always in unbalanced parts — and, although it may seem that one is taking over, the other one will never be fully defeated.
To illustrate the state of affair, I have chosen an example that belongs to the early interactions field. There, the cases in which a ‘good’ mother feels compelled to be a ‘saint’ are not rare. Beyond this commonplace, a deeper exploration of such a symptom will bring out various, yet unique configurations of the way in which a much deeper suffering, with much ampler effects on the child développment, can gain structure.
In his paper entitled ‘Chronicles of fusion and defusion’1, Denis Ribas works through a vast amount of knowledge in order to prove the great importance of the maternal function in baby's drive-integration process. Speaking of the mother ‘that fuses’, the writer introduces a quibble that is extremely eloquent for the investment's variations which a child has to endure from a mother who doesn't give up her feminine function: the mother that ‘fuses-intrigues’.
However, the mother is ‘intriguing’ before ‘fusing’: ‘being a result of adult sexual pleasure, the maternal function is its antipode’, explained