Mother-child relationship: What research says

In 1985 Paula Caplan and Ian Hall-McCorquodale conducted a research paper on the presence of the concept of the pathogenic mother (“mother blame”) in the most important clinical publications in the United States. After a selection of 125 works from the different psychopathology journals, they found 72 different pathologies in which mothers have attributed the responsibility for the condition suffered by their children. They found no reference to the existence of a pathogenic parent.

The issue of the pathogenic mother is directly related to the prevailing family model in the last two centuries, a model that we know as the traditional family, based on the distribution of roles based on gender, with women corresponding to domestic chores and raising children. children and the man the attainment of the economic income necessary for the maintenance of the family and the offspring, in general numerous.

This traditional family model based on the sexual division of labor also entails a complementarity in roles, a mutual dependence. However, instead of the mutual recognition expected on account of the division of roles, what we find is an overinvestment, a hyper valuation of the masculine, understanding as such the role of the man, to the detriment of all feminine. The woman, linked to the domestic and nurturing, is absent from the public, and relegated to a condition of inferiority, of a man in less.

Such a model is being progressively replaced by more advanced forms, such as what Mabel Burin calls "transition families", models that try to respond more adequately to the challenges that social transformations demand, and above all to what it means the revolution of gender roles, a direct consequence of the movements for the emancipation of women.

The transitional family, generally made up of couples who work and have few children, presents an attenuated male dominance, compared to the undeniable of the traditional model. The functions are divided according to gender, although in a more fluid, less fixed, more interchangeable way, with exceptions that vary in each case. Such exceptions correspond to what the author calls “traditional bastions”, alluding to the need of women, or men, to keep the last word on the domestic or financial sphere. Likewise, there are a couple of conflicts derived from contradictory expectations in each of the members present in the formation of the family, generally around security and independence.

Around such bastions, the stereotypes that we can privilege of this traditional model are constituted and, to a lesser degree, in its evolved variants, stereotypes that would be synthetically summarized in the figures of the overprotective mother and the absent father, habitual figures of the casuistry both in mental health and social services.

The overprotective mother is a neurotic, demanding mother, with depressive and/or hypochondriacal tendencies, who present with certain emotional lability, very dependent, with traits of affective immaturity even bordering on infantilism, with outbursts of anger, a certain episodic and recurrent victimhood, at the same time, that she turns all her narcissism into family achievements, be it her husband's or her children, or both.

The absent father appears rigid, hieratic, tending to authoritarianism even to violence, without the need for affection and communication - censored in the family sphere -, looking abroad for that recognition that his role prevents him from demanding it within the family. Often beset by financial uncertainty or personal insecurity, he is faced with the need to maintain a false appearance of strength and security. The tension between superego demands and repressed or denied needs for affection and recognition will give rise to typical pathologies of masculinity.

If the overprotective mother turns to the achievements of her children to obtain certain rewards, the father will do so about social appearance: money and material goods. Maldavsky has underlined the eroticization of numbers and calculation in many men, who find in the obsessive recount a fleeting consolation for their anguish.

Numerous gender studies have linked these stereotyped roles with the development of certain pathologies, both on the female side (depressions, somatizations, somatoform disorders), and the male side (character armor, neglect of affections, addictions, aggressiveness, violence …)

The confluence of feminist thought, anti-authoritarian sociological currents, and certain sectors of psychoanalysis is giving rise to critical thinking, which reveals the consequences of a model of gender relations such as the one we have just outlined.

If we accept the importance of early relationships, early learning, and early childhood experiences, we will agree on the need to review the parameters on which such relationships are based.

We are especially interested in one of the classic proposals of developmental psychology, shared by disparate schools, which is the need for the baby to separate from the mother. The baby, to grow and mature, has to separate from the mother, become independent from her and achieve her autonomy, especially if it is a male baby. This independence from the maternal is considered a standard of normalization, a guarantee of health.

Whether it is a male baby or a female baby, her first identity is built on early exchanges with the mother, the presence of the father, although growing, is still very secondary and scarce. The incorporation of the father in the first care is going to have consequences that are difficult to evaluate, in fact, the authors do not agree. Thus, if Nancy Chodorow already raised the coeducation of children as one of the ways to overcome this gender inequality in 1978, Jessica Benjamin some years later (1988) expressed her doubts about it, especially if this participation of parents was not accompanied by a transformation of the models on offer. That is, of what is understood by masculine or feminine identity.

The human baby, the human child, is born in a state of absolute helplessness and dependence, a state of vulnerability that is offset by an intense relationship with the person who cares for it, be it its mother or someone else - in our culture and in general, his mother-. This intense relationship protects the baby from her helplessness, thanks to the construction of a maternal-infant constellation that we know as omnipotence. Such omnipotence is accentuated in the narcissistic mother-son duo, enveloping the latter in an atmosphere that usually guarantees the regular satisfaction of her needs.

This primitive bond with the baby has to be transformed and evolved to allow its development and evolution, however, the influence of phallocentric thought, the nucleus of a patriarchal social order consists in maintaining that the abandonment of the first identification with the baby. mother, and its replacement by the father as an identifying figures is synonymous with evolution, maturation, and health. The father in the third-party position is a pole of identification considered beneficial regardless of his particularities, which do not usually deserve further comment in the works assigned to this paradigm.

Benjamin reminds us, on the contrary, that the maturation of the baby is not facilitated by transferring to the father those ideal characters attributed to the mother of the first interactions, an idealized father is as harmful as an idealized mother. The maturation of the baby depends on her being able to de-idealize the parents, on her having a more realistic image of her parents. It is not enough for the father to stop being absent, it is also necessary that we contemplate what position she occupies in the family relationship. An authoritarian father generates identification mechanisms in the son in which submission and self-denial predominate.

The alternative proposed by the author, instead of substituting identification with the mother for another with the father, with the same characteristics of idealization and submission, consists of a process of recognition of differences, that is, recognition of the other - the father, mother ... -, in what is similar and different, in his reality. This recognition of the otherness of the other is a development process very different from that of identifications classically defended.

If the starting conditions of human rearing are extremely vulnerable, the predominance chose by various currents make us emphasize more one aspect or another of the infantile psyche. Classically, the difficulty of assuming the narcissistic wound that meant the loss of infantile omnipotence has been highlighted in babies. Even as we mentioned in a previous intervention, some authors place in this narcissistic wound, and in the difficulty of its handling, the origin of the violent behaviors and attitudes of adolescents, even more so, of adults in numerous cases.

But less attention has been paid to another no less important aspect of the budding subjectivity of the human child, infantile curiosity, the origin of all knowledge. The infantile needs to connect with the other, to bond, to recognize that other on whom they depend, whose presence has been so important in the first moments of the baby's life.

Even theories about infantile play vary greatly if we think of the child's play in the terms Freud proposes it, that is, determined mainly by the absence of the mother, and therefore, under the slogan of consolation, of elaboration of loss, or else we think of the child who plays driven by his desire to know and recognize the world, driven by his spontaneity and supported by a mother who guarantees the right environment - as in Winnicott's model -. A game that leads him to put the reality of the other to the test, his ability to survive in the face of childhood destructiveness.

What is the fate of the primary mother-child relationship? Although we must make some clarifications, whether it is a male child or a daughter, the fate that this first relationship suffers is that of being intervened by the father. Psychologists maintain the need for paternal intervention in a maternal-infant relationship considered harmful. Now, we should specify what we intend in this intervention of the third party, so mythologized by psychoanalytic orthodoxy, that when he speaks of the father's intervention as a third party according to court he seems to have discovered the philosopher's stone. We intend a substitution of the idealization of the mother of childhood, now deposited in the father since as a third party he becomes the guarantor of access to the symbolic world, representative of the law, of the social, ultimately the defender of the child in the face of voracity. sickness of the mother figure, or rather it is a recognition of the subjectivity of the other, of the otherness of the other, and therefore of their own limits.

Identification is an incorporation of the other into the world of internal fantasies, be it the father or the mother, taking the place of objects of the internal relationship fantasized by the baby. This identification, so necessary at the beginning, becomes an obstacle to the recognition of the reality of the other, beyond the subject, as well as their own limitations and capacities. This access to the reality of the other has been specially studied by Winnicott when differentiating the relationship with the mother, as an internal object, concerning the relationship with a mother that is beyond the mental representations of the baby and therefore constructs an incipient sense of reality. Thanks to this recognition, the baby can, in turn, acquire a sense of reality independent of her mental products, which is an extraordinary advance in his perception of the external world.

The primary mother-child relationship has been classically criticized because it appears that mothers often overthrew their own needs for personal satisfaction on their children. The sacrificial altruism of mothers, which could sometimes even take the form of masochism, was and is at the service of their narcissistic needs, for Freud, a basic constituent of femininity, calls it moral masochism. Having identified her children, the mother hopes to obtain the satisfaction that the social order has denied her in other ways: social, professional, or intellectual.

The evolution of women in the last 30 years has greatly outdated these approaches, the expectations of women today open to multidimensionality of fields that go far beyond the reduced space of parenting, the rewards and frustrations are diversified to the par that interests and expectations.

This transformation of social relations, which is being accomplished by leaps and bounds, forces us to review traditional approaches to gender identity and parental roles. In this sense, we cannot maintain that the mother-child relationship requires parental intervention to enable the separation, to allow the child to grow and develop, thus blaming the mother for a supposed tendency to infantilism in the child. However, this prejudice is implicit in numerous interventions that are carried out from different health devices.

The paternal and maternal functions have traditionally been considered as two confronting poles; on one side the father represents the exciting pole, the father who approaches his son with games and activities that excite his curiosity, his muscles, his skill. The mother classically represents the pole of containment, care, and support of the child in the face of difficulties and illnesses. Now, although in our culture the father represents the pole of growth and the mother the pole of regression, we cannot maintain that in reality, the father is the only one who promotes the development of the child. On the other hand, and especially in the case of the father-daughter relationship, the great neglected of studies, to think that the regressive pole is sustained in the mother, and not in the father is at least picturesque to argue.

The real problem posed by the mother-child relationship is not that of infantilism, nor the child's difficulty in becoming independent or separating from it, the difficulty arises insofar as this relationship does not allow the recognition of the or

Another, in this case, the mother, in her radical otherness. The relationship with the mother is not one of mutual recognition, the mother continues to be the object of love and hate par excellence. She is idealized, feared, and repudiated, she continues to not be recognized as an agent subject of her desire, insofar as she is sexed with interests beyond the mother-child pole that she classically defined her. This process is more evident in the case of the male child, although it concerns both sexes. In the case of the girl, the dilemma arises later when the primary identification with the caregiver mother requires her to maintain an identification also with a passive mother, whose subjective capacity to desire is seriously questioned in our culture.

The child, the human child, develops from a state of undifferentiation with the other primordial, this development leads him to a primary identification with the mother, or father and mother together as an undifferentiated being, according to Freud's thesis. From there, psychoanalysis privileges the need for separation, a differentiation in which the other, usually the mother, is transformed into a facilitating environment, an environment that is sufficiently protective for the child development.

Both psychology and psychoanalysis have privileged the axis of separation and differentiation, but have systematically denied the fact of dependence. Dependence is considered an uncomfortable feature of childhood life, which must be rejected and overcome to become an adult. The influence of patriarchal masculine values is evident here. However, as MacIntyre reminds us, anyone who wants to explain the human condition cannot forget two fundamental facts: vulnerability and dependency.

The same author recognizes that masculinity, since the time of Aristotle, consists of denying the need for help and comfort. He quoted them: "those who have manhood are distinguished from women because they do not want others to be saddened by their pain."

If the values of masculinity are sustained by the rejection of dependence, it is evident that the boy will reject the primordial bond of dependence established with the mother, and if it were with the father due to the vicissitudes of life, he would suffer the same rejection. Thus, male subjectivity is sustained in the limit denying the relationship with the other, as long as this relationship involves some emotional or affective dependence. The recognition of the other, of the mother, and of the infantile bonds with the mother (and/or the father) is impeded by the demands of the masculine identity.

As for the girl, she can maintain that childlike bond with the mother, however, and because of this, she will find herself in the position of giving up or at least stifling a part of her potential. The figure of the mother as a gender identity model entails the development in the girl of an altruistic character, of her ability to take care of others, of the consideration of her as a valuable sexual object; at the same time, She outlaws and stifles much of her curiosity, and necessarily her hostile tendencies, her aggressive tendencies, as these conflict with the ideals of motherhood.

The guilt and symptoms suffered by many women today when faced with the dilemma of choosing their intellectual and social development over the fulfillment of their maternal ideal, often incompatible with the above, is the best evidence we can adduce.

This patriarchal system of polarized genders are sustained by a division, a primitive split: gender identity is not built thanks to and through mutual recognition, of the other and of oneself, it is built by the exclusion of the other, by ignorance of the other. other. Another is represented in our culture mainly by women, but also by everyone who represents the difference.

This ignorance of the other implies in the boy the repudiation of the mother to achieve masculinity, while in the girl, the renunciation is a part of her subjectivity to preserve the gender identity with the mother and femininity. This rejection of the mother, in any case, is a rejection of original dependency because masculine identity traits are based on the exaltation of independence and autonomy, and the denial of any dependency bond. As MacIntyre says "blindness towards women and denigration of her are linked to male attempts to deny the fact of dependency"

This rejection presents two closely connected aspects, firstly the woman is considered from the prism of an ideal mother, on condition of excluding her own sexuality, secondly, she is considered as a privileged sexual object, but without subjectivity. Thus, Lacan's aphorism about the woman as “not all” takes on another dimension, since that “not all” is the condition to sustain the masculine identity of the man safe from what must be kept invisible. Lacan intuits like few others that the phallic dimension does not exhaust the subjectivity of the woman, but she is not capable of thinking beyond the phallus.

The criticism of this patriarchal system of division and polarization of genders, as well as the appearance of different forms of coexistence have motivated concern in many sectors about the danger of losing clear references to gender identity. It is clear that for the infants, the human child, a fundamental passage is the capacity to establish a difference between the sexes, the capacity to identify with one of the sexes, and the need to be recognized by others.

Until now, psychology, psychoanalysis and pedagogy have privileged the aspirations of independence and separation, as a synonym of growth and maturity, over the needs of connection and recognition. This has meant in practice the appearance of stereotyped models that we have summarized in the figures of the overprotective mother and the absent father. If there is something that we want to highlight In a summary, it is that in both cases we can see the result of a relationship model characterized by the rejection of the other, which entails the rejection of the ties with the other, or to put it in the manner of Benjamin: the rejection of the other within ourselves.