The mother’s relationship to her own mother is an aspect of the intrapsychic work a woman must accomplish when she contemplates the decision to have a child and then becomes a mother. Often women seek our professional help when they are aware of conflict about taking on this role. But, it is also common for a woman to seek treatment after becoming a mother when she experiences difficulties she did not anticipate.
The sense of being like mother creates special challenges for a girl as she struggles to individuate and become a separate person in her own right. This is true even in those happy situations where the mother-daughter bond has been positive and loving overall. Unfortunately, we often meet women in our office who have had less than optimal relationships with their parents. Such women will often have significant problems should they become parents. In a conventional nuclear family, a daughter’s tie to her mother is enduring both because she experiences herself as so much like her mother, but also because father, as alluring and loved though he may be, is usually less involved and available on a day-to-day basis. This dynamic may be evolving as women expect their husbands to play a more equal part in parenting and more men allow themselves to experience the pleasures such involvement can bring. Nonetheless, in most cases, her mother continues to be a girl’s primary role model and an important source of security and satisfactions well beyond childhood. Even when both parents work outside the home, women have yet to share parenting responsibilities equally and when nannies or other caretakers are involved they are almost always females.
Recall Freud’s phallocentric assumption that the little girl blames her mother for her “castrated” state and turns to father for a baby as compensation. Today this strikes most of us as simplistic and flawed. Thanks to the many female analysts who have studied and written about feminine development the story of a girl’s fantasies, conflicts, and self-representations is understood to be far more complicated than can be subsumed under the belief in “penis envy” as a universal bedrock concept. To be sure, a girl may idealize her father and other men for various reasons. She may yearn to be the sole object of his love and experience her mother (as well as siblings) as a competitor for his attention. Rivalry, jealousy, envy, and other troublesome feelings may interfere with, and complicate, a girl’s attachment to her mother. Arguably, however, there are cultural factors which will just as strongly if not more so influence how a girl comes to view her gender. We must acknowledge that women, even in our 21st century world of undeniable opportunities open to them, still have much to resent that goes well beyond issues of anatomy. The recognition of significant sociocultural factors that contribute to the formation of the female psyche has expanded and enriched the psychoanalytic comprehension of female development greatly.
An extremely noteworthy shift in our world view today involves the recognition that a woman does not have to become a mother to be a fully actualized and happy adult. Possessing the means for reproductive choice has allowed females to reject the assumption that motherhood is an inevitable goal or end point in their development. In the past a woman who placed other desires ahead of following this traditional prescribed route was viewed as an incomplete person. While there is still a long way to go, progress in loosening rigid gender roles is occurring. I’ve worked with older females
who, for a variety of reasons, never became parents and have felt quite satisfied with their lives and choices. Some of them had passing regrets but on the whole came to feel they were better off for not having gone down that path.
For example, Mrs. A. had been a successful lawyer who married late in life. Somewhat to her surprise she fell deeply in love with her future husband whom she met when they were both in their fifties. He was divorced with an adult child from his first marriage. Mrs. A. developed a warm relationship with her stepdaughter over the years but did not seem to feel she had missed out by not having a biological child. Undoubtedly there were complicated factors involved in her decision, but I’m emphasizing her acceptance and comfort with it. Mrs. A. had grown up in a rural community, an only child with rather cold, immigrant parents who had had little formal education. Mrs. A. was gifted intellectually and managed to escape the limited world into which she had been born by both winning scholarships and finding mentors who recognized her talents and strengths. She had never sought therapy until her husband became ill and died. By this time both she and her beloved husband were retired and had been enjoying their free time to pursue their interests and travel together. While her grief was intense, there was never the sense that she regretted not having been a mother herself. As her sadness lessened, she often told me stories of her professional accomplishments with clear pride and pleasure. After a few years of treatment, she was able to resume her passions for gardening, photography, and travel with an acceptance of life’s arc and inescapable losses.
Writing about the many females who do seek to follow a more traditional childbearing path, Nancy Chodorow has shown us how a girl’s primary identification with her mother sets the stage for her own wishes to become a mother. In her view many women experience what feels like a drive or biological urge to become mothers, but this very biology is itself partially shaped through unconscious fantasy and affect that cast what becoming pregnant or being a mother means in the context of a daughter’s internal relation to her own mother.
Sometimes our patients’ struggle to integrate unconscious maternal identifications with conscious attitudes that are often quite negative toward their mothers, so much so that some disavow any desire to become a mother. For these women rejection of motherhood is a clear disidentification with their own mother. Then there are those women who postpone pregnancy to pursue a career only to discover it may be too late, although some of these may be women who couldn’t face their rejection of motherhood on a conscious level. I have in mind patients I’ve known who resented the prospect of putting someone else’s needs ahead of their own and couldn’t imagine the deep satisfactions of mothering a baby as adequate compensation for the sacrifices that would be required of them. Sometimes such women have never wanted to relinquish the role of the one who is cared for.
For those who do choose to have children the conflict between loving and hating mother, as well as identifying or disidentifying with her, is often unconscious and may result in hyper-vigilance and excessive anxiety about how good they will be as mothers. Rosemary Balsam has observed, “Often, it is only when a woman has become a mother herself that she experiences the full impact of her own internalized mother.” She believes, and I agree, that becoming a mother offers our patients an opportunity to work on the conflicted identifications which have remained unconscious.
For some patients it is as though they use their conscious memories and fantasies about how they were mothered as a template for how not to be a mother. For example, a patient of mine would mock her own mother’s preoccupations about safety by describing how her mother would gasp loudly whenever she or her brothers attempted some physical exploit. When she had a child, she forced herself to inhibit her sense of danger with her own child, even to the point where her toddler was sometimes in real peril. Other women behave in ways with their own children that truly represent a progressive liberation from inhibiting rigidity. I think of women today who abhor dressing their daughters in princess costumes or depriving them of playing with toys traditionally seen as boyish such as trucks, cars, and balls. These somewhat superficial signs of liberation and enlightenment are not the problematic aspects of disidentification that are likely to be most challenging.
When Mrs. B. had her first baby, she lived in almost constant fear of traumatizing her baby girl as she herself had been. On one level her intense anxiety could be understood as the insecurity any young mother might have about being “good enough.” This was how I first viewed her preoccupation with causing injury, physical or psychological, to her child. We came to understand Mrs. B.’s worry had largely to do with a sense she harbored something destructive inside that could escape and cause havoc if she wasn’t always watchful. This destructiveness was easily traced to her childhood view of her own mother. Even more horrifying to her was a dim awareness there might be something sadistically pleasurable about doing to her own daughter what was done to her. It is frequently women who recognize the pathology with which they were raised who are the most mistrustful of themselves.
Another young mother who had been sexually abused with her mother’s complicit knowledge was always second guessing herself and attempting to get her therapist to guide her explicitly in the early years of her child’s life. Ironically this inability to trust her own instincts was only partly a result of recognizing her mother’s failure to protect her. It was
also an effort to recreate the mother-daughter situation she grew up with whereby mother was always behaving in a dominating and controlling fashion with her.
Another patient throughout her childhood had felt undermined and neglected by her mother. Mrs. C. could be quite eloquent and vitriolic about her mother’s narcissism. Yet, when her first child was born, she couldn’t wait to escape her son’s demands and return to her work life, much as her own mother had withdrawn emotionally from caring for Mrs. C and her siblings. Only when she had been in treatment for several years could she recognize, with genuine guilt, how she had identified with her own mother and shut down the intense attachment that should have existed between her and her own child. This avoidance of intense emotional connection was, of course, an issue in her marriage, as well as in her relationship with me. To her credit she worked hard to establish the kind of bond she had avoided when her child was much younger.
As she reflected on the emotional problems her detachment had caused her son, she came to understand she had kept her distance from him partially from a fear of being like her mother. At the same time her distance and neglect were an identification with the mothering, or lack of it, she had experienced. One day she reported a dream in which she was vomiting out a shark. This shark both represented her angry, competitive feelings toward her mother and her fantasy of expelling the destructive anger and envy she believed she had taken in from her mother. Mrs. C. was able to maintain a loving, attentive relationship with her father characterized by far less apparent ambivalence than she experienced toward her mother. She resented that he had always deferred to mother when Mrs. C. was growing up. Even when mother criticized and demeaned him, he turned a deaf ear to the insults and continued to display loving devotion to his wife.
I don’t want to imply that a woman’s quality of mothering is exclusively based on her complicated, ambivalent identification with, and attachment to, her own mother. Many other identifications play an important role in how a woman parents her own child. First and foremost, there is usually a father who has been an early object of attachment. Balsam has presented clinical examples in which a father has been a young child’s primary caretaker without causing apparent damage. Other relatives such as grandparents are also often involved. Adrienne Harris and others have emphasized a girl’s identity is assembled from many sources both male and female. In the current social structure in the United States and elsewhere in which women work outside the home, many babies and young children have caretakers who are not biological parents but serve as objects of attachment and identification.
Many of us, in our work with patients who are parents, have served an important role in contributing to the healthy development of their children (Imber 2010). This is often achieved both by modifying our patients’ unconscious self-object relationships and also by serving as new models for how one cares for and nurtures another human being. Young women who seek out female analysts are often hoping to rework some of the more problematic aspects of their attachment to their own mothers. Happily, this goal is often achieved by good treatment. In my experience as a supervisor these positive results can be achieved with male analysts as well as with females. We often speak of early identifications as fixed in stone. But, as analysts we recognize the possibility of change for our patients. Although character is enduring it can also sometimes be modified by life experiences.
Editor’s Note:
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