Mothering & Psychoanalysis: Clinical, Sociological and Feminist Perspectives

Abstract

Petra Bueskens has edited and organised an impressive array of contemporary writing on mothering and psychoanalysis from clinical, sociological and feminist perspectives. The book consists of five sections: the therapist as mother; the mother in therapy; mothers in art and culture; mothers in theory and practice; and mothering, therapy culture and the social. Highlights of the volume address maternal subjectivity; the rewards and unrecognised costs paid by working mothers; the relation between the devaluation of care and the feminisation of the helping professions; and how maternal legacies may ravage daughters, whose maternal bonds may lay siege to a sense of agency hijacked by anger, envy and a perpetual sense of loss. This issue of mother-daughter ambivalence is touched on in many of the essays across the five sections of the volume, and will be the focus of my discussion here, particularly in relation to how maternity and a woman’s identity are thought of as either condensed, distinct or informing one another. One of the themes of the volume is the way a daughter’s sense of abandonment, or a perceived absence of care, (whether due to her mother’s own ambivalence, or depression, for instance, or her other social commitments), can animate what Jungians refer to as dark animus, where the struggle to individuate from the mother prevents realisation of a maternal inheritance on the side of agency and care. S. Alease Ferguson and Toni C. King’s chapter ‘Dark Animus: A Psychodynamic Interpretation of the Consequences of Diverted Mothering among African-American Daughters’ presents cases of African American women whose adolescence was marked by the absence of their mothers, many of whom were working as domestic carers in other households. Such absence and the demand to pick up the domestic work and care for siblings left these women struggling with maternal ambivalence or a refusal to become mothers themselves. Nancy Chodorow, in ‘Too late: The Reproduction and Non