Psychoanalysis has long neglected maternal subjectivity. Within psychoanalytic theorising, a mother is usually treated as 'object' of the baby's desires, or depicted through the 'containing' or 'transformative' function that she performs. The mother as a person in her own right has been largely absent, as are the subjective meanings a woman gives to moment to moment lived experience of mothering a young child. Psychoanalytic omission of maternal subjectivity is not merely a theoretical lapse, but has several dire consequences as will be mentioned here: • Maternal de-subjectivisation negates the personal experience of mothers. • By demanding that mothering extend intrauterine 'merger' postnatally, psychoanalysis unquestioningly privileged the biological mother of pregnancy as carer. • The neonate's assumed 'monotrophic' connection to the gestating mother relegated all other relationships as secondary (including paternal and siblings) and ruled out shared-care. • This exclusivity conflated autonomic 'placental' provision with the conscious postnatal carer, demanding she provide continuous nurturing: '365 days a year 24 hours a day' as Bowlby advised (WHO Monograph, 1951). • Idealisation of maternal function (coupled with denigration of mothers) is linked to inevitable failure to deliver. • The consequential maternal guilt, anxiety and self-blame were labelled as natural female masochism (Deutsch, 1944). • Extrapolation from research into homeless children, 'maternal deprivation', was held responsible for long-term mental health and behavioural problems (Bowlby, 1951)-causing ordinary mothers to feel self-conscious about work outside the home, and wary of limit-setting. • Pathologising of maternal ambivalence led to demonisation of mothers-not only of Frieda Fromm-Reichman's 'schizophrenogenic' variety but of all mothers for all ills in the child.
A model is presented, based on clinical experience, mother-child observations and survey data, delineating two different maternal orientations towards babies and motherhood. The essential difference in orientation is that the Facilitator mother adapts to her baby while the Regulator mother expects the baby to adapt. On a behavioural level these two orientations are manifest in differing maternal practices: the Facilitator mothers exclusively, responding spontaneously to her baby's needs as they arise, whereas the Regulator establishes a routine to foster predictability and shares mothering with her partner or other caretakers. This paper explores three areas within the different maternal orientations of the Facilitator and Regulator: conceptualization: conscious beliefs and expectations of motherhood and babies; practice: observable differences in adaptation to pregnancy, labour, birth and early weeks of motherhood, and differential postnatal vulnerability to psychosocial provoking factors; unconscious processes: identifications, phantasies and defences underlying these practices. The psychogenesis of the two maternal orientations is explored. It is suggested that unconscious identifications between various aspects of the mother's internal world and the foetus determine the maternal orientations, with the Facilitator mother employing idealization and manic reparation to sustain her maternal beliefs while the Regulator engages in manic defence and dissociation. Conscious and unconscious processes operate in conjunction with current socio-economic circumstances to determine maternal practice.
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