The Maternal Covenant role and function of the mother in the social field

Abstract

ABSTRACT Juliet Mitchell suggested the need for a principle to intervene at the level of sibling murderousness and called it the law of the mother in reference to Jacques Lacan’s law of the father. While binding the mother and the child to an agreement, this principle does not possess all the properties of a Law. This type of formal agreement has existed in legal thinking since the highest antiquity and is called a covenant. The covenant is not universal, it is valid only for the two parties who commit to it and its transgression is not penalised by a third party representative of the Other. I have called this regulatory principle the Maternal Covenant. It’s power rests on a metonymic process, in which the mother invokes kinship while hiding the unconscious object of her desire. I call this process the Maternal Metonymy. The concepts of Maternal Covenant and Maternal Metonymy are useful tools for the understanding and treatment of issues such as the pathological use of violence, unbearable rivalry both within the family and in the social group, failure or dysfunctional socialisation and the consequences of indecent or shameful behaviours.