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I am grateful to Daphne de Marneffe for her sensitive and in formed reading of my paper. She takes what is both emergent and la tent in the piece and clarifies my argument, strengthening a tenta tive through-line that seeks to illuminate how maternal consciousness is structured, in part, around a relation with a child, before extending its implications to the wider social situation of mothers and to the psychotherapeutic project of psychic and emo tional change. It is a rare pleasure to have one's thoughts under stood, clarified, and extended in such a way.
De Marneffe helpfully summarizes the contribution of the paper as falling into three discrete areas: the deconstruction of the “unity/ fluidity” dialectic as a contemporary way of speaking about the tran sition to motherhood; my discussion of psychoanalytic notions of maternal subjectivity that I believe run into difficulties when the mother is unwittingly returned to her function as object in the devel oping world of the child, or her subjectivity is figured as precisely what lies beyond her child; and my use of the metaphor of the wig as a way to understand the essential paradox of maternal transforma tion.
I am grateful, in particular, for her inventive reformulation of mi mesis towards the end of her commentary, as a way in which we in habit biological, social, and historical roles, whilst making them our own. My figure of the wig was underdeveloped. I had an intuitive sense that it might be useful but was unable to fully work through how it could be utilized to help think about maternal transforma tion. In de Marneffe's view, the constrictions of various representations