The Bernard L. Pacella, MD Parent Child Center of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute promotes the optimal emotional growth and development of families and children (from pregnancy through age 12). Although the center provides a variety of services and educational and research programs, the backbone of its activities, since 1991, is a model of Parent Child Groups for parents and children (birth through 3 years). The program, which has served 225-250 mother-child dyads, has received citations for excellence from the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Association for Child Psychoanalysis.
Our psychoeducational program is conducted in a warm, accepting, and nonjudgmental environment where mothers can feel comfortable becoming the kinds of mothers they choose to be. The center utilizes psychoanalytic/developmental principles to help mothers address their voiced and unvoiced concerns to help them locate the best parenting tools within themselves and experience joy in their child rearing. The groups enable mothers to handle challenges in parenthood arising from their own childhood experiences; to evaluate developmental information and conflicting advice; and to learn to read the cues and needs of their children. In these ways, group participation fosters their competence and confidence as mothers and furthers the socio-emotional development of their children.
Over 50-60 percent of our mothers participate in the outside work world, many part time and some full time. Thus, we have come to understand the balances that are required to combine child-rearing and homemaking with a professional life outside the home.
Many analysts in earlier decades studied pregnancy and motherhood; their work came to be overshadowed by psychoanalytic feminism of the 1980s and early 1990s, which attempted to address women's inhibitions in the social sphere. At the Pacella Center, seeing mothers who make varied choices—both those who work outside the home and those who do not—has allowed us to re-think the central dogmas of feminist psychoanalytic theories. A contemporary theorist whom we find helpful is Daniel Stern, with his seminal contribution of the concept of “the motherhood constellation.”
Stern notes that the motherhood constellation “concerns three different but related preoccupations and discourses, which are carried out internally and externally:
the mother's discourse with her own mother, especially with her own mother-as-mother-to-her-as-a-child,
her discourse with herself, especially with herself-as-mother, and
her discourse with her baby.”
Thus, a new mother may find that she is less concerned with her father (and oedipal themes), her baby's father (usually also her sexual partner), and with work than with the new baby, her own mother, other women, and with themes of growth and development. Wishes to be valued and supported by a maternal figure (“the good grandmother transference”) may be prominent. Some psychic reorganization along these lines occurs for most new mothers, whether or not they work outside the home, and whatever the reasons for their decisions about paid work. The motherhood constellation promotes a woman's emotional tie to her baby.
Some women experience conflict and ambivalence about their sense of themselves as mothers, in contrast to a fuller sense of themselves as working women. Other women feel greater satisfaction from mothering their babies than from working. Some women feel in conflict between these desires, whereas others can balance the demands of mothering more easily with the demands of work life.
Therefore, the same message cannot be given to all mothers. Many mothers need to work for financial reasons and arrange the most economical child care possible, including utilization of their extended families. Other mothers work despite the fact that a large portion of their salary goes to child care. What we have learned throughout the years is that some women are “better” moms because they are home full time and others are “better” moms because they do work full time. All too often, motherhood and advancement in the workforce outside the home seem to women to be two mutually exclusive domains. But psychologically these domains need not be mutually exclusive. Each woman needs to find a balance that works for her and her family.
Working mothers' conflicts can be manifested when they come home from work. In a still-relevant classic paper from over two decades ago, Doris Bernstein described a typical dilemma. Faced with two opposing demands, such as, “I should prepare dinner for my children” and “I should work on a professional task,” men in Western culture usually have no conflict; the commitment to work is fixed and dominant. Women are more likely to experience conflict in choosing which activity to do. Much more than men, they are likely to experience guilt no matter what their choice.
Leon Hoffman, M.D., director of the Pacella Parent Child Center, has spoken to professional and lay audiences and written widely on various parenting and child care issues, including “Mothers' Ambivalence with their Babies and Toddlers: Manifestations of Conflicts with Aggression” in JAPA.
Many mothers, while at work wish they were home with their children, and while at home wish they were back at work. Unfortunately, too often it is believed that to be a good mother, a woman has to eliminate conflict and ambivalence about her own personal wishes as well as about her feelings toward her children. Psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker suggests that the problem is not maternal ambivalence itself but rather the guilt and anxiety ambivalence provokes that prevents mothers from acknowledging and accepting their ambivalence.
In the Parent Child Groups at the Pacella Parent Child Center, we help mothers understand the universality of ambivalence, and we help them acknowledge their own conflicted feelings to themselves in order to master their conflicts rather than having to deny them or become overwhelmed by them because they are so frightening. They can feel more in charge of their own feelings and create a better balance between work and home; often, this involves ensuring that their spouses participate in homemaking and child-rearing activities.