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Witch-mother is which? The potential role of the analyst in facilitating authentic motherhood
(2017)
This paper explores challenges in the treatment of women suffering from disturbances in maternal identification. A review of the psychoanalytic and developmental literature focuses on the frequent finding of early-onset mother–daughter relational disturbance involving maternal narcissistic fragility and exaggerated dependency needs, intergenerational trauma, and related psychopathology including mutual affect dysregulation. A case example of a young woman with a severe anxiety disorder is presented and discussed to illustrate the challenges to the traditional psychoanalytic technique. This patient avoided pregnancy into her late thirties and entered analysis with feelings of inauthenticity, characterological masochism, and a >secret mission< to unmask the witch recurring in her dreams. Through an elaborate working-through of negative maternal transference, the analyst and patient saw through the birth of the patient’s authentic self, a new approach to her career, her relationships with men, and her anticipation of the birth of a child by the sixth year of treatment. The author posits that psychoanalytic technique benefits from contemporary, attachment, and trauma research that supports the analyst’s playing a more active role in approaching, co-regulating, tolerating, and integrating avoided affects and memory traces that are associated with early-onset relational disturbances worsened by the effects of violence, maltreatment, and loss.
The initiator of the conference and (together with Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor) conference co-chair, Harold Blum, introduces the objectives of the interdisciplinary and psychoanalytic conference on >Parent–Infant Disturbance: Theory and Therapy.< In the epilogue, the author brings up the coincident Paris terrorist attack of November 13, 2015 – the first day of this two-day conference.
How can some classical Freudian concepts such as defense, transference, infantile sexuality, and the role of the body ego and superego in the first year of life be applied to help the analyst working with parent–infant dyads? The case of a newborn that could not look at her mother, who did not feel empathy towards this child conceived as a result of an egg donation, was understood using Winnicott’s notion of early superego and the lack of libidinal pleasure. The notion of defenses towards primitive anxiety and the role of unconscious maternal functioning were helpful in helping the child as well as the parents to regulate their interactions.
This essay addresses some of the challenges involved in accounting for history’s impact on psychological development. First, I consider how the personal beliefs and theoretical assumptions of psychoanalysts and historians can limit their understanding of other people, whether in the past or the present. Second, I examine the degree to which an individual’s perception and understanding is always a reflection of the collective cultural understanding in which that person lives. I apply these two observations to the discussion of how European Jewish psychoanalysts responded to the traumas of the Holocaust in the decades afterWorld War II. I suggest that individual responses were shaped by the absence of a collective discourse about the Holocaust during this time. When examining the past, I maintain that psychoanalysts and historians should be cautious, lest their current theories determine their understanding of the past.