As part of the ongoing Committee on Women in Psychoanalysis (COWAP) North America Film Series on Gender, invited guests Rosemary Balsam and Janice Lieberman joined moderators Margarita Cereijida and Anne Adelman online in March 2022 to discuss the 2021 film The Lost Daughter, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and based on the 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante. The film explores the complexity, messiness, shame, rage, and longing of a young mother unable to reconcile her reckless desires with the demands of mothering her young daughters. The discussion, re-presented below, focused on issues pertaining to motherhood and gender, such as the idealization and renunciation of motherhood, maternal ambivalence, female ambition, and the multiplicity of women's desires.
—Rosemary H. Balsam
Maggie Gyllenhaal, in adapting Ellen Ferrante's 2006 novel where nothing happens by chance, has given us a magnificent movie portrait of a psychologically complex woman, Professor Leda Caruso. In close female-to-female interaction with her on vacation on an idyllic Greek island are a young Greek-American mother Nina, her child Elena, Elena's doll Neni, and the pregnant aunt, Callie. Leda's daughters, Bianca and Marta, are heard as adults on the phone checking up on her and shown in flashbacks between ages three and five. Two baby dolls are key figures: Leda's own, Mini Mama—first hers and then her daughter's—and Elena's favorite doll, which Leda steals. The granular emotional detail of some of many female-gendered experiences, not only mothering but daughtering, is exposed.
Leda, the lead—mythically raped by swan Zeus—is an “unnatural” mother, as she says. We see her as an academic, wife, mother, daughter, divorcée, child, young adult, and troubled older woman. She is a curious, polyamorous flirt—rigid, cold, singing, dancing ecstatic, trotting fast like an elderly toddler, away from temptations and impulsive desires. Leda is full of maternal revenge toward young mothering. Her lost youth of regret and guilt becomes re-enacted in a secretive sick fantasy of tenderly protecting the stolen doll Neni, saving her from what she imagines to be her abusive four-year-old owner. Elena loudly grieves its loss on the beach to Leda's cruel private satisfaction in repeating her own child-rearing traumata—goading the child to agitate and torment the brittle, flaky, sexually hungry mother, Nina, with whom Leda identifies.
In The Lost Daughter, intense girl-to-woman comforts, appetites for identification, modeling and internalizing of the physicality of day-today early caretaking, and observational and exploratory bonding—all with their accompanying discomforts—are laid bare.
Leda's rapt attention conveys to others that they are special to her. Nina falls in crush with her after Leda finds Nina's lost Elena (while in her own reverie of once fearing her child had drowned, due to her neglect on a beach, just like mother Nina). Being a university Italian teacher is cool, but “Motherhood,” Leda declares, is a “crushing responsibility.” She has fallen badly under its weight, having deserted her little girls for three years of their early childhood to abscond abroad with a male fellow teacher, defying her husband's tears. Sustaining a quality of attention to others that she celebrates as “the rarest and purest form of generosity”—she is a scholar of Auden's poem “Crisis”—is problematic inter-personally for her. Leda's intellectual work echoes her domestic emotional life and preoccupations (not unknown in personal analyses!).
Critics have said that this movie offers a rare glimpse into the common pulls that women feel among work, domestic lives, and mothering. Yes and no. Yes, to the general portrayal of the universal dilemmas. However, no, in individual terms. In portraying an individual wife and mother, Gyllenhaal's presentation is vastly more psychologically sophisticated than most. It shows a woman's universal range from intense love to hatred of her children. But here it is the remarkable portrayal of the uniquely unbearable intensity of these pulls for this particular woman that is riveting.
Gyllenhaal focuses the impact of the physicality within the mother/daughter pairs into their procreative bonding—highlighting the doll as an uncanny transitional image, both familiar and unfamiliar. As I've noted in Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2012), procreative and procreative/sexual elemental and developmental exchanges in mothering with daughters have not proved a popular topic for psychoanalytic exploration of Freud's “dark continent.” Yet, as in this film, lay people and artists all along have known it. Only in phallocentric psychoanalytic thinking could we distort doll play into something major about missing penises! In The Lost Daughter, intense girl-to-woman comforts, appetites for identification, modeling and internalizing of the physicality of day-today early caretaking, and observational and exploratory bonding—all with their accompanying discomforts—are laid bare.
The best cinematographic metaphor for Leda as a mother, which recurs in the movie, is the rhythmically flashing lighthouse: brilliant light beams, sudden darkness, and again brilliant light. Leda's gleaming white-tooth smile, ample bosom, and boisterous, laughing body contact are seen in brief flashes with the sound of the foghorn in the background, warning wary ships from getting too close to these treacherous rocks. In this lighthouse style of mothering, Leda is all over her little girls, guzzling them playfully and joining them passionately in their joyous giggles, screams of laughter during dress-up, and seemingly magical peeling of oranges. Yet suddenly she turns dark to the children, switching her light beam seductively toward a man, to refuel her feeling of being dazzling and beautiful. Olivia Colman is indeed brilliant in this role.
In the radiance of their mother's reflection of them as talented, verbal, pleasing, dressed-up dolls, Leda's children shine. But in her darkness, they are bereft. “Mama, mama, mama, mama,” escalating into whines or tears or uncontrollable sobbing, is a haunting leitmotif of the soundtrack. “Lighthouse Mothering” is the certain the stuff of toxic and insecure attachment.
Leda gives her own doll to her child in a flurry of generosity. Mini Mama is passed to the next generation. Delighted, Bianca scribbles on its body. Leda flies into a rage at her ingratitude, hurling the doll out to crash on the pavement below. Her stunned child murmurs, “But you gave it to me … it's my doll.” Bianca's sin is too much autonomy. Leda punishes Bianca to an outer darkness of emotional annihilation.
The child cuts her small finger, imitating her fun mother peeling an orange. She cries and wants Mama to kiss the hurt. This is too much of a hot mess for Leda. She turns her back. The horrors of messy body fluids and messy emotions become an unbearable burden.
Leda's own childhood experience is there too. She tells Lyle, the janitor, “My mother was very beautiful … I felt when I was … [a child] that she didn't share it. That she had … in creating me … separated herself from me … like pushing a plate away from you when the food is repulsive.” Psychoanalyst and critical theorist Julia Kristeva writes about this as “abjection.” Her theory engages with the inherent agonies and repudiation of separation, with much suggestive birthing imagery.
Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own, “We think back through our mothers, if we are women.” One imagines, if Leda were in analysis, she'd say, like many of our own patients, “I don't want to be like my mother.” And twenty years later Bianca and Martha might echo an identical plea: “I want not to become like my own mother.” Familiar? But richly, visually, artistically familiar.
—Janice S. Lieberman
When I first saw this film, I thought: What a great opportunity for psychoanalysts to think about conflicted motherhood, daughterhood, memories, and fantasies, as well as bodies and women as objects of desire. I have been an admirer of Elena Ferrante and her books for many years but had not read this book until after I saw the film. I prefer the film for the impact of the visual. Most people I have spoken to have had very strong reactions to this film. They either loved it or hated it. What does it arouse? Is it a horror movie?
In considering what to say here, my first thought is that a discussant, like a mother, has to contain, to hold, to make things that seem incomprehensible more comprehensible. There are several narratives going on. The film is not just split in terms of time, past and present, but fragmented into subplots, with a rather large supporting cast of characters.
One line of thinking concerns mothering and its differences. Imagine a continuum from good mother to Winnicott's good enough mother to average mother, then rather bad mother to bad mother to, finally and grievously, monstrous mother. I think of the children of good mothers, as well as the parentified children of narcissistic mothers, whom we see in this film. As Melanie Klein described, the mother must contain and tolerate attacks on her breast—on her maternal provisions. Young Leda tried but failed. She played with her daughters as if she were one of them; she overstimulated them and then abruptly pulled away in anger, unable to tolerate their tears and entreaties. She fantasized about Yeats's poem “Leda and the Swan,” longing to be ravished, penetrated by Zeus, rather than her impotent husband. She abandoned her daughters for her Zeus Professor. Quoting another Yeats poem, “The Second Coming,” she notes, “The center cannot hold.” When I first saw the film, I thought it was about, on the surface, motherhood versus career. Yet it also seemed to be about the lure of sex, romance, being appreciated, dealing with the high-minded abstract intellect rather than the repetitive concrete needs of children, especially for a mother who was not well cared for by a good mother.
So, we see Leda observing families on the beach, in particular the gorgeous (rather
bad) mother, Nina, who manages to lose sight of her daughter. Little Elena wandered away in her mother's hat while Nina was kissing or arguing with her husband, Tony, Elena's father. Elena leaves her own child, the doll, with her head in the sand, perhaps upset by her parents' kissing and arguing. She becomes the left-out Oedipal child and bites the doll's cheek, her transitional object.
Through all of this, Leda seemed pleasant, low-key, benign—until the moment we realize that it was she who stole the doll. Prior to that, everyone was grateful to her for finding Elena. At this point the horror movie possibility kicks in. Why did she take the doll? To go buy her clothes at the store, as we see her do? To then leave the doll on her terrace for Lyle to see and to be found out and punished?
With all the mothers in the film, was there a good mother in the bunch? After asking Leda to move her chair and not liking her refusal, Callie, the forty-two-year-old pregnant aunt, offers Leda some birthday cake as reparation and puts ointment on Leda's bruised back. In the toy store, Callie takes the sobbing, clinging Elena from her mother, Nina, who avers that she cannot do it anymore. Yet Nina has the bandwidth to don multiple bracelets and jewelry, do elaborate makeup and hair, and even have an affair with a twenty-something named Will who works at the beach bar. Elena is a parentified child, cooling her sunbathing mother with water. Similarly, Leda's daughters had comforted the younger Leda while she lay on the floor, emotionally beyond their reach.
Leda sees her younger self reflected in Nina. At times, Nina stares at her as if she would like to eat her up. She seems to imagine that she is a good mother until she discovers that she is in fact monstrous.
The film points to the importance of identifications with the mother: the giving of dolls from mother to daughter and their destruction; the ability to peel an orange in one piece like a snake! Little Bianca tries to peel an orange like her mother but cuts herself. The child's poignant whine “Kiss it, mommy” and Leda's snakelike refusal went through me like ice. We see blood again at the end when Nina stabs Leda with the hatpin in her navel, the site of the umbilical cord. This scene refers back to the scene with the orange, which also has a navel.
What at first seemed like paradise becomes paradise lost: the pinecone bruise, the storms, the cicada on the pillow leaving a stain, the moldy fruit, the useful hatpin that enables one to keep their hat on straight which becomes a weapon. The ending is unclear: Is Leda dead? Is she dreaming that her worried daughters have been calling her?
The film The Lost Daughter is unsettling because it challenges the myth of the ideal mother, a mother who has no desires of her own and who is always available to her child.
Earlier, Leda confesses to Nina, “I am an unnatural mother.” Early in the film, it appeared that she had the thought of leaving her own children when she asked a hitchhiker visiting them about the children she had abandoned. She fantasizes that Lyle was a good father, something he was not. Leda, like many bad mothers, acts like a good and caring mother; witness her instructions to her babysitter. Yet when she hears the girls have chick-enpox, she stays where she is—away. The children have all kinds of toys. She buys them lovely white dresses. She gives but then is gone. She seduces and abandons, thus leaving her children with an unreliable sense of what is real—does their mother love and care for them? Is her heart in her mothering? Do they matter to her?
Films are compelling because they teach us about the complexities of human relationships and the human heart. We can observe several characters at the same time in the same frame. A brilliant writer such as Elena Ferrante manages to do this in her novels, but reading them does not allow us to listen and look at the same time. Through films, we are able to form multiple identifications simultaneously. The Lost Daughter is a film psychoanalysts should see.
—Margarita Cereijido
The film The Lost Daughter is unsettling because it challenges the myth of the ideal mother, a mother who has no desires of her own and who is always available to her child. The film explores the maternal ambivalence of wanting to take care of the child and wanting the child to disappear. There are multiple instances of daughters and dolls getting lost. Nina's daughter, Elena, gets lost, and Elena's doll gets lost. We also learn that when she was a little girl, Leda's daughter, Bianca, got lost. And we see Leda angrily throw Bianca's doll out the window, smashing it. Finally, we learn that Leda abandoned her daughters for three years. For a mother, maternal ambivalence teeters on the edge of loss and abandonment: the disappearance of the child is both her dark fantasy and her worst nightmare. This holds true, as well, for the child who both hates and desires the mother.
The de-idealization of motherhood has become more salient during the Covid pandemic. During Covid lockdown, many mothers felt overwhelmed by their maternal responsibilities, further raising awareness of the need to confront the idealization of motherhood. Challenging the idealization of motherhood is also part of a broader attempt to question traditional stereotypes and become more inclusive as a society.
I will discuss this process from three perspectives.
To begin, not every woman's ideal is to be a mother. Cultural changes interact with the desires and the possibilities for
sublimation for individual women, creating new ideals and identificatory models. Today, many factors contribute to these cultural changes. The feminist movement has created new ideals and identificatory models, helping change women's conceptions of themselves. As a result, getting married and having children is no longer the only way of being fulfilled and securing financial support. Work provides women with alternative sources of fulfillment and financial independence.
Historically, the traditional path for a woman's life involved getting married and becoming a mother, and that ideal was transmitted from generation to generation. The perfect mother had to contain, love, and understand her children, and be willing to sacrifice everything for them without ambivalence. She also had to be a loving and supportive partner. Today, younger people challenge that ideal.
We live in a transitional time. The construction of new subjectivities is influenced by values of both traditional and contemporary cultural ideals. Some women feel pressure to live up to both traditional and new ideals. They feel the need to be perfect professionals, partners, and mothers. They have internalized idealized demands that are impossible to achieve. Having multiple references can lead to ambivalence and anxieties.
While there have always been conflicts between ideals and realities, such conflicts are exacerbated today by greater freedom and more possibilities to explore and access new ideals, including new gender identities and family configurations.
For younger generations the gender dynamics are more fluid. This fluidity enables women to take up multiple roles and live up to their ideals. Among the young, there is a challenge to stereotyped binarism, and today, it's not uncommon for people to take up roles voluntarily that were previously assigned strictly according to gender. Additionally, access to birth control and assisted fertility technology further contributes to separating motherhood from “nature” and making it something cultural.
The lack of access to legal and safe abortion forces women to continue undesired pregnancies. This naturalizes maternity and disempowers striving for other goals. Contemporary authors, such as Adria Schwartz in her contribution to the volume Representations of Motherhood (Yale University Press, 1994), challenge the notion of motherhood as instinctive, maintaining that being a mother requires the cultural desire to be one. Some women may want it and some may not.
Secondly, non-traditional models of mothering, such as in mono-parental and homosexual families, are increasingly common. According to classic psychoanalytic theories, the epitome of the development of healthy female sexuality involves becoming a mother. This was best captured in Freud's notion that after the resolution of the Oedipus complex, a girl's wish to have a child by her father is sublimated into the desire for a child within an adult heterosexual relationship. That thinking has been mostly abandoned, due to changes that include the decline of the patriarchal paradigm and our culture's questioning of the central place of the long-accepted classical family. Society has become more open to various gender roles and family configurations.
Another challenge to the idealization of motherhood is the acknowledgment of ambivalence inherent in the mother-child relationship. Such ambivalence is related to the intensity of the child's early needs and the very passionate nature of mothering. As Julia Kristeva states in a 2005 online article titled “Motherhood Today,” Motherhood is a learning process in how to relate to the other. It “begins with the pregnant woman's passion for herself.” Then, “in the wake of the lover-father's intervention, she splits in two, harboring an unknown third person, a shapeless pre-object.” This is “followed by the mother's passion for a new subject, her child, provided that he stops being her double and that she detaches herself from him so that he gains autonomy. … The ‘good enough mother’ succeeds in loving her child as herself, and then as another self.”
The idealization of motherhood obscures the inevitable ambivalence in the mother-child relationship. The tension between the idealized model and the inherent ambivalence in the maternal function can become too stretched, inevitably resulting in disappointment of the expectations of absolute harmony between mother and child, making the mother feel inadequate.
Motherhood can be a wonderful, gratifying, and special aspect of the feminine. However, its idealization can make mothers feel inadequate for their ambivalent feelings. The idealization of the classic patriarchal model can also pathologize those who embark in different directions.
The idealization of motherhood can inhibit women who do not want to become mothers or choose to pursue other avenues of fulfillment. That is particularly relevant today as women have multiple desires and ideals. The tremendous impact of the film is in its articulation of the intense ambivalence and anxieties that many women are struggling with in relation to motherhood.
Elena Ferrante is a writer who specializes in capturing the exquisite flection of ambivalence. We can count on her to be truthful, to speak to the layers that lie deep beneath the surface. Her writing is subtle and raw and reveals the nuance in a look, a word, a small gesture, firing up the unconscious interpersonal and intrapsychic flashes that electrify the characters' every movement, thought, and action. Ferrante's 2012 novel My Brilliant Friend was wildly popular. Her Neapolitan trilogy sparked the imagination, speaking to the ebb and flow of close friendships. Who has not experienced the balancing act of an unsettled friendship—hating when you should love, envying when you should applaud, fighting and repairing, letting
go and reuniting—with friends who hold our secrets and love us unconditionally?
Unlike My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante's 2006 novel The Lost Daughter—the basis for director Maggie Gyllenhaal's film—seemed to elicit an unexpected visceral repulsion. Time and again I heard friends say, “Oh, I won't see that movie, it's too disturbing.”
Ambivalent mothers, I surmised, are something we just don't want to know about.
The character of Leda in the film presents the viewer with a deeply disturbing enigma. Perhaps Leda loves her children, but she is unable to derive joy from them. Motherhood does not fulfill her. Is the movie, we ask ourselves, about love, in its terrifying, wild, and reckless ruins? Or is it about a failure of the ability to love? Or as Leda describes it herself, is it about “unnatural” love?
The movie haunts the viewer by capturing in exquisite detail terrifying moments of missed connections and losses. Mothers, daughters, and dolls are repeatedly lost and found. Leda's name—as well as her daughter's—is recurrently mispronounced or mistaken. That no one seems to be able to hear Leda say her name reinforces our view that she herself is unknowable, both to herself and to others. Leda's name derives from the Greek myth, but she attributes it to the Yeats poem “Leda and The Swan”: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still above the staggering girl … he holds her helpless breast upon his breast.” Like in the poem, the Leda on the screen is staggering, terrified, yet her gestures are vague—she is overtaken by impulses that she seems to not understand. She is a vague mother and an equally vague lover.
Only young Leda's lover, Professor Hardy, responds directly to the subtle undertones contained within her name. By reciting together a verse of Yeats's poem, Hardy and Leda allude to the meanings hidden in her name, the name bestowed on her because of her parents' love of Yeats, suggestive not only of the intensity of Leda's sensuality, but also of its ravages.
As the poem conveys and as the myth tells us, Leda, the beautiful wife of King Tyndareus, turned away the attention of Zeus, who then forced himself upon her in the form of a swan. The urgency and intensity of Yeats's poem captures the violence of the rape and the knife-edge of seduction/desire/violence. Similarly, when Professor Hardy's attention is captivated first by Leda's brilliant mind, then by her beauty, he forces her to be the one to rupture the barrier: “You are married, so you will have to start.” However, in the film, although Leda repeatedly falls sway to the power of men whom she then disarms or discards, they seem to matter far less than the compelling relationships among women.
As a mother, Leda's attention is disrupted over and over as she vacillates between intense love and fits of anger. At times, we witness her children quite literally drop out of her mind. In a fugue-like state, she walks away from them as if she has forgotten that they are there, even as they are riveted by her mysterious magical powers, chanting “Peel it like a snake, don't let it break” as she peels an orange in one smooth, unbroken coil. She grows enraged at their inability to contain their aggression, as in her daughter's angry-play wreckage of her own childhood doll or in the nearly unbearable scene of her young daughter hitting her, driven by a wild need to know what will happen should she defy her unpredictable and capricious mother. We cannot help but be terrified for these two young children.
“I'm just an unnatural mother,” Leda tells us.
These moments of discordance create an ache in middle-aged Leda, who revisits her memories of motherhood while observing the family who join her at the beach. As the family matriarch, the pregnant Callie—Callisto—flaunts her maternal fullness and spars competitively with Leda, taunting her with her pregnant belly. We recognize Callisto from Greek myth as another beauty who attracted and was seduced by Zeus. In Callie's pregnancy, long awaited and longed for, Leda seeks some sign of recognition of her own terrible emptiness. “Children,” she tells Callie, “are a crushing responsibility.” Through flashbacks, we bear witness to a crushed young Leda, grappling with palpable guilt and despair.
The film contains image after image of rotting from the inside—the fruit, the fallen pine cone and subsequent festering wound on Leda's back, the worm climbing out of the doll's eye—that capture the drama of this tormented mother. Is it natural, we must ask ourselves again and again throughout this movie, to experience the aggression, envy, hatred, and cold indifference at the core of this mother's soul? Or have we forbidden ourselves to acknowledge a mother's private passions, powers, and desires?
Can a rupture in mother-love ever be fully repaired? In a riveting scene in which Leda's husband, unable to persuade her to stay in her role as wife and mother, threatens to leave the young girls with Leda's mother, Leda whips around and hisses at him that he cannot take them to “that shithole”—to her own bad mother. In a later scene, Leda tells us, “My mother treated me like she was pushing a plate away when the food is repulsive.”
These scenes capture the drama of intergenerational transmission of maternal anguish. We witness the pain and confusion in her children's eyes: does she love them, does she want them, will she leave them? Throughout the series of flashbacks, we observe developmental changes in Leda's daughters, as they move from efforts to playfully seek their mother's attention to aggressively demanding her attention by biting, hitting, and devouring to, in the end, withdrawing from her into uncertainty, sadness, and detachment.
Toward the end of the film, when Nina pierces Leda with the hatpin, she creates a hole that penetrates deep into Leda's belly, as if straight into her womb. Stepping away from the brink of her own disaster, Nina has resolved to punish Leda for her irreconcilable choices. In the end, we are compelled to ask, can a mother ever fully meet the immense demands of motherhood while also attending to her needs and wishes? We are left with Leda's enigmatic final remark: “I'm alive, actually.”
Rosemary Balsam, M.D., FRCPsych, MRCP, is a Northern Ireland psychiatrist, associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University, training and supervising analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, and author of Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2012).
Janice S. Lieberman, Ph.D, is a training and supervising analyst and faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York, where she maintains a private practice. She has authored two books and is a frequent presenter.
Margarita Cereijido, Ph.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Her publications include Psychoanalytic Explorations of What Women Want Today (with Ellman and Goodman, Routledge, 2022). She is chair of COWAP North America.
Anne Adelman, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist affiliated with the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Freudian Society. She has co-authored or edited four books and co-edits JAPA Review of Books. She maintains a private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland.