Maternal Studies: Beyond the Mother and the Child

Abstract

Human subjectivity, ethics, autonomy, gender -from a psychoanalytic perspective, doesn't everything start with the mother? Studying the maternal (the mother, the child, and their relational attachment) becomes a starting point for understanding both subjectivity and autonomy. It could be argued that being an autonomous adult means precisely that mothering is no longer needed. But if we understand autonomy as a process that takes into account relational unconscious dynamics and their entanglements as the way through which one also attempts to know oneself, then providing a space for the other's separate and autonomous living which was once a part of maternal provision, continues to represent what we all need from the other, and the very process through which we also relate. Maternal studies could be described beyond the study of the actual mothering of a child, as the study of the way we relate and separate, and, in our adult life, the way we negotiate and re-enact our selves through the puzzling unconscious and fantasy roles of mother, child, self and other, as well as all third terms that intervene between them.Maternal studies, in a broad understanding of the term, is somewhat the 'mother' of all (other) themes in psychoanalytic and psychosocial studies; the idea of the maternal breaks free from the mother-child couple as if needed as a resource and means to live our life as adults; that is, as supposedly autonomous subjects.'Prior to sexuality as the unacceptable there was helplessness. Dependence was the first thing, before good and evil ' (Phillips 1988, p.7). The maternal, I think, is evoked as the answer to human dependence -doesn't it signify a highly specific and perhaps indescribable ('unacceptable') stance that involves taking care of another person, someone utterly dependent and vulnerable, a child? And can this stance be separated from a wish (demand) for such mothering, and our identifications with such a child? Doesn't the image of the mother evoke the image of the child in an (uncomfortable) reversal of Winnicott's famous statement about there being no such thing as a baby (without a mother)? Feminist theorists have been critical of classic object-relational psychoanalytic developmental theories that persistently focus on the perspective of the child. But we might be able to explore what this persistent perspective as an ideal can tell us of mothering as an expression of the wished-for-mothering that each of us would perhaps like to have received, and incite a theory of what we are able to do with this wish, in order to find

Reflecting on 10 years of Maternal Studies

“…When the participants in my thesis were discussing or reacting to One Born they would often do so through either their own maternal experiences, 2 intergenerationally through their mothers' experiences, or through their own imagined future maternal experiences, in dialogue with representations of birth and mothers in the show. My participants' reactions answered calls to understand further how the maternal affects women, not just mothers (Baraitser 2008, Curk 2009, Tyler 2009). If we consider the maternal to be relational, and if the participants in my research positioned themselves as maternal subjects through their reactions to televisual birth, then this is significant.…”

Mothers and Others

“…Moreover, it has made me think about the social and political contexts, conditions and impetuses that have underlain my choices, whether I was aware of them or not. 1 Curk, P. (2009). 2 Hollway, W. (2009).…”