Bettelheim has invented a kind of listen-with-mother version of Freud’s account of the superego, the agency of social control in the mind that is meant to subdue human desire but can only do so by strapping the poor, defenceless ego to its allotted social role. For Freud, the ferocity with which the superego carries out its task means that we should acknowledge the oppressive and self-defeating nature of civilisation’s highest commands. The last thing psychoanalysis should do is join in. Instead, if analysis can help reduce the harshness of the superego, then you are less likely to go on punishing others and yourself. For Bettelheim, on the other hand, mothers must be driven by guilt into a role that, by his own account, is false. Children must be saved from hatred at any price. And since he will not give his name to Badinter’s book, even though he thinks she is right, the price includes suppressing the truth. Hatred is therefore the guilty party (something of a tautology). What is being asked of mothers – perhaps the demand behind all demands – is a hate-free world.
When D. W. Winnicott wrote his essay ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’ in 1949, he surely must have known that he was breaking taboos. When he listed the eighteen reasons a mother has to hate her baby, he must have known that he was pushing hard against the ideal (‘The mother hates the infant from the word go’).3 The last and most often cited in his list (‘He excites her but frustrates – she mustn’t eat him or trade in sex with him’) is another of the rare instances in psychoanalytic writing where a mother is allowed to be sexually aroused by her baby.4 Winnicott’s essay has become a type of urtext for women seeking to shatter the cliché of benign, devoted motherhood, a weapon to be wielded on behalf of maternal ambivalence struggling to be recognised. Ambivalence does not, however, seem quite right to me, at least not as a set of feelings to be ‘managed’ or which contribute to the creativity of a mother’s task, a reparative move often made in feminist discussions of maternal ambivalence, as if the only way to deal with maternal ambivalence is by giving it with one hand and taking it back with the other (which is oddly in tune with its nature).
In Winnicott’s vocabulary, Melanie Klein’s concept of reparation does not figure, a healing capacity that slowly develops in the infant in relation to the mother, and which allays the rage towards her – a rage inevitable for all babies as they encounter the earliest frustrations. He is talking about something else, something so acutely painful that it cannot be felt without the risk of effacing itself. It is a form of hatred that, against all her better ‘instincts’, the mother needs to know she is feeling, and to stay with, if the infant is to have any chance whatsoever of experiencing, other than by means of a violent ejection, true affect or feeling in her or himself. The alternative is masochism. Winnicott is therefore making a political point: ‘If, for fear of what she may do, she cannot hate appropriately when hurt by her child she must fall back on masochism, and I think it is this that gives rise to the false theory of a natural masochism in women.’5 The baby, he writes, ‘needs hate to hate’.6 Sentimentality, he concludes his paper, ‘is useless for parents’.7 This has lost none of its pertinence today. ‘What we have, for the most part,’ Daisy Waugh writes in I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Women (2013), ‘is a repressive sentimentality, a smiling acceptance of female martyrdom, which teeters, at times, beyond martyrdom into a sort of approved, mass-culture masochism.’8 Waugh’s insights are, however, trounced by her breeziness – that ‘Thoroughly Modern’ of the title is the giveaway – with its suggestion that if mothers feel punished, they only have themselves to blame (guilt-free motherhood, when presented here as a mother’s duty to herself, turns out to be no less punishing or guilt-inducing than the account of Bruno Bettelheim).
Winnicott’s argument does not mean, as should not need stressing, that the mother does not love her baby. As Alison Bechdel puts it in her cartoon strip drama Are You My Mother?: ‘The mother loves the baby too. But this is the point. Hate is a part of love.’ Bechdel’s book, published in 2012, narrates her quest to reach some kind of mutual recognition with her mother. Her bestselling Fun Home (2006), subtitled ‘A Family Tragicomic’, focused on her relationship with her father, the director of a funeral parlour – hence ‘fun home’ – who had homosexual relations, and at the age of forty-four committed suicide (as well as being turned into a Broadway musical that toured the US, Fun Home was removed from libraries in Missouri after local residents objected to its content). Are You My Mother? is a type of Winnicott primer. The chapter from which that quote is taken is called ‘Hate’, while others – ‘True and False Self’ and ‘The Use of an Object’ – are lifted straight from his writing. She tells us Winnicott’s life story, lays out his eighteen reasons on the page, reminding us that he was revolutionary for using ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ decades before anyone else. She also graphically pursues him into the bedroom of his second marriage, where he and his wife discuss the strangeness of sex (Bechdel is not alone in assuming that only this second marriage was consummated). ‘I want him’, the narrator says at one point during therapy, ‘to be my mother.’9
As well as issuing an unprecedented emotional permission to mothers, ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’ should be compulsory reading for anyone involved with today’s government-sponsored rapid, short-term talking cures (cognitive behavioural therapy and the like). Winnicott was addressing himself to psychoanalysts who could not bear the strain of acutely disturbed patients. Only an analyst in touch with ‘his own fear and hatred’ will be of any use to such a patient, only such an analyst will be responding to the patient’s – as opposed to the analyst’s – own needs. CBT, with its questionnaires and instant results, would then be therapy designed to protect the therapist, by getting hatred out of the room as fast as it can. For Winnicott, the analyst must place her or himself ‘in the position of the mother of an infant unborn or newly born’.10 This is not, in my understanding, how most analysts tend to think of themselves, although Michael Balint’s idea of analysis as fostering the birth of a ‘new beginning’ gets close (an idea of birth that has nothing to do, therefore, with the favourite game of Ariel Leve’s mother). Remember, too, Rich from the start of this chapter: ‘Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity.’11 When Winnicott’s widow was faced with the suggestion that Freud had admired Attila the Hun, she replied that he had also loved Virginia Woolf’s focus on the ‘intricate things’ of life. ‘I put the odds on a psychic death-match between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty,’ Bechdel writes in response. ‘To be a subject,’ she continues, ‘is an act of aggression.’12 Violence, as any mother will tell you, is not something that can be lifted or erased from the human heart.
Winnicott is presenting us with a choice, one no less starkly on offer today. We can go for the therapeutic quick fix, the full-frontal assault on any traces of psychic complexity, to be smoked out like rats in the basement. We can opt for hatred of hatred (Bettelheim’s problem, I would say). Or instead we can take as a model for our social as well as psychological well-being the complex, often painful reality of motherhood. This is not quite the same as suggesting mothers should rule the world, but it is close. Provided we hold on to the idea that what qualifies mothers for this task is that they are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human. Not, it also should be stated, that mothers are the only ones who ever have access to such insight.
* * *
Are You My Mother? is full of writers. Alongside Winnicott, they are mostly but not exclusively women, some of whom we have already come across: Rich, Woolf and Plath. Are You My Mother? is a textual collage. It is through fierce verbal and textual contestation that the narrator’s struggle with her mother takes place: ‘Language was our field of contest.’13 When Bechdel was eleven, her mother ‘took over’ writing her diary entries on the eve of Rosh Hashanah: the day ‘when the deeds of humanity are open for review’, ‘the righteous are inscribed’ and ‘the wick
ed blotted out’ (she does not appear to see a problem in her mother thus assigning herself the place of divine writ and punishment).14
Her mother is a dedicated reader who took a master’s degree in English education in order to qualify as a teacher, and who was also an amateur actress. As a young woman, she had attended Roe v. Wade demonstrations in support of abortion rights (although the ruling has repeatedly been subject to legal challenge and local bypass, when Bechdel wrote her book it was not threatened as today by the election of Trump). None of this means, however, that she can tolerate her daughter’s lesbianism. When her daughter plucks up the courage at university to write and tell her, she replies: ‘Couldn’t you just get on with your work? You are young, you have talent, you have a mind?’ This is an eerie echo of Mrs Winterson’s riposte to the same revelation from Jeanette Winterson: ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’ – the title of her justly celebrated memoir of 2011. The tragedy for Bechdel is that her mother cannot see the link between her daughter’s right to mental freedom, no less the result of women’s struggle, and her right to freedom in the sexual choices of her life. In fact, they are alternatives: ‘you have a mind.’
Her mother suffered depression as a young woman. Psychoanalysis was not an option for her. We could say that psychoanalysis, like feminism – Bechdel is the child of both – came too late: ‘By the time The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, Mom was stuck at home with two small children.’15 She is part of a generation, which is the generation of my own mother, whose destiny was above all to become mothers and who found themselves, after a devastating war, under the harshest obligation to be happy and fulfilled in that role. Could it be that however much they encouraged their own daughters’ independence, however much they urged their daughters to live their own unlived lives, they were also silently obeying an injunction against experiencing the full range of their emotions? And that the demand they made on their daughters then became, above all else, to keep up that guard, to protect them from their own raging hearts?
Winnicott’s 1949 essay would not, then, have arisen out of nowhere, but as a response to the suffocating psychic legacy the recent war was in danger of passing on to its children. For, to stay inside his vocabulary, the child of such a mother will be a false self, compliant not just with her mother’s demands to do what the mother wants – which is how he mostly describes it – but with the mother’s hidden inner world, a world of cloying, restricted vision, inside which she is flailing without knowing it. Unless the daughter manages to shatter the carapace that encases her in the mental space of a mother who, through no fault of her own, was never given the chance to understand her own mettle, to realise what – in all senses of the term – she was truly made of. Bechdel’s answer to her own question – Are You My Mother? – is finally affirmative. But the path to understanding is littered with images, lifted from her dreams and nightmares, of cracking ice, shattered glass and kicked-in walls. ‘It only occurs to me now as I am writing this book about my mother,’ she muses as she lies, after one of her mishaps, with a patch over one eye, ‘that perhaps I had scratched my cornea to punish myself for “seeing” the truth about my family.’16 This also adds another dimension to Bechdel’s choice to be a graphic artist (to make us see).
Perhaps we should be asking a slightly different question – not what a mother is or should be, but what version of motherhood might make it possible for a mother to listen to her child? For if Western culture in our times, especially in the US and Europe, has repeatedly conspired to silence the inner life of the mother by laying on mothers the heaviest weight of its own impossible and most punishing ideals, and if the term ‘mothers’ is so often a trigger for a willed self-perfection that crushes women as mothers before anyone else, then how can they be expected to hear their children’s cry – not as in wailing babies, which is of course hard enough – but as protest and plaint? How can they bear to watch their child shed the yoke of false mental safety, turning what was meant to be the psychic legacy of their own version of motherhood on its head?
For me, this has always been the best way to think about the relationship between Sylvia Plath and her mother, which is not quite the same as focusing on the excessive closeness or osmosis through which that relationship has often been analysed. In Are You My Mother? Bechdel reads Woolf but not Plath, her mother more or less the reverse (as if, between mother and daughter at least, the one has to exclude the other). This leaves a chasm between these two preferred writers, notably on the subject of mothers. In fact, Plath’s 1962 verse drama, Three Women – A Poem for Three Voices, her voice meditation on three women in a maternity ward, was inspired by Woolf’s The Waves.17 When Plath’s mother, Aurelia, lectured on her daughter after her death, she interspersed her memory of Sylvia with lines from the First Voice, the only one who ends up with her baby – the Second Voice miscarries, the Third Voice abandons her newborn child. When the BBC issued the script in 1968, they named this First Voice ‘Wife’, the two others, ‘Secretary’ and ‘Girl’, a gross interference, since in the text only the woman who miscarries is represented as having a husband (if you have a baby, you must be a wife). From out of the modulated confusion of the three voices, which is the genius of Plath’s poem – a community of mothers whose voices gradually merge across divisions of experience, domestic life and class – Aurelia Plath lifts and isolates lines like these from the First Voice:
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do with its love?
And these:
I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
…
I do not will him to be exceptional.
It is the exception that interests the devil.
She left out lines like these:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
…
I am the centre of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrowing must I be mothering?
Can such innocence kill and kill? It milks my life.
I am breaking apart like the world.18
The point being that Plath did not shy from putting atrocity, cruelty and murderousness in the midst of a mother’s love: ‘The world conceives / Its end and runs towards it, arms held out in love.’19 But her own mother could not stand it. A mother censors a daughter’s representation of mothering, shutting down the world of thought. ‘Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff!’ Plath wrote to her mother in her last letters, ‘stop trying to get me to write about “decent, courageous people” – read the Ladies Home Journal for those.’20 The last thing a young mother needs, I hear Plath saying, is false decency, courage and cheer (a perfect definition of a compliant self). If it was just a question of cramping her daughter’s style, then, however poignant this story, it would be easy to point to the blindness of Plath’s mother and turn away. But the implications surely reach beyond the tragedy of this famous case. What on earth do we expect, as long as society continues to believe it has the right to trample over the mental lives of mothers?
* * *
For the most part, the world, like Aurelia Plath, does not want to know about this dark underside of loving – instead projecting onto the minds and bodies of mothers a revulsion for the complexities of the human mind. The more I have read, the more motherhood has started to feel like a ball tossed from one end of a playing field to the other, or perhaps more like the net stretched taut across a tennis court, which the frenzied players, hitting the ball as hard and fast as they can, must avoid touching at any cost (although it determines their every move). Or, to draw on set theory, a very different field of reference, we could say that a mother is the set of all possible sets, the one all-embracing set that contains everything, including itself. Mothers, of course, are classically thought of as containers, the Greek idea of the womb as a purely passive receptacle being perhaps the most egregious version of them all. But that a mother contains is surely true: inside h
er body and then again when she holds her baby. In one psychoanalytic model, it then also falls to her to contain all the overwhelming impulses the baby cannot contain or manage on its own behalf – which is why a mother who pushes away difficult feelings, too eager to turn away from pain and rage to decency and cheer, is useless.
Nor are these impulses simply the result of the dissatisfactions of life that all humans, in the course of development, find themselves up against. ‘Even the most loving mother,’ Melanie Klein writes at the end of her 1963 essay on the Oresteia, ‘cannot satisfy the infant’s most powerful emotional needs.’ And, she continues, ‘no reality situation can fulfil the often contradictory urges and wishes of the child’s phantasy life.’21 This means that in the beginning no one is guilty (even though Klein’s dramatic account of the ferment of a baby’s mind had critics accusing her of inserting into psychoanalysis the idea of original sin). There will always be something that escapes the remit of what a mother and baby can be for each other. There will always be a limit to what mothers can do for their child, and therefore – the unavoidable but mostly avoided consequence – to what we can ask of a mother.
‘[It] is characteristic of the mental domain,’ psychoanalyst W. R. Bion writes in his influential 1962 essay ‘Container and Contained’, that ‘it cannot be contained within the framework of psychoanalytic theory’ (a rare moment of psychoanalytic humility). Writing at almost exactly the same time, Klein and Bion are two psychoanalysts who alight on that aspect of the human mind that exceeds human grasp and which, for Bion at least, even psychoanalysis cannot be expected to hold in its proper place. ‘I cannot observe Mr X,’ Bion writes of one patient, ‘because he will not remain “inside” the analytic situation or even “within” Mr X himself.’ Mr X cannot be contained (he is spilling all over the place). Crucially for Bion, this is not just a matter of individual pathology but has wider social repercussions since it applies to any group trying to be ‘respectable’ (his word), to toe the line, to be ‘anything in short, but not explosive’.22 Not being explosive will do nicely as a definition of what is mostly asked of mothers, although, as any mother will testify, explosive is what she, to her utter dismay, often feels: there is nobody in the world I love as much as my child, nobody in the world who makes me as angry. It is this demand – to be respectable and unexplosive – that I see as most likely to drive mothers, and by extension their infants, crazy. I realise, of course, that this is the opposite of how these matters are normally thought about: if a mother cannot hold things together, who can?
Mothers Page 9
