Chapter 11 – the motherhood constellation
Motherhood is not just a continuation
of a previous psychic state but a categorically different psychic state
to any other time in a woman’s life.
“Motherhood Trilogy”
The motherhood constellation concerns 3 different but related preoccupations/discourses and discourses which occur internally and externally:
Those things require mental
work and mental reworking. Mother become less identified with her father,
with her role as a careerist, or as a woman in general or wife-of-a-sexual-partner
(as opposed to a supporter).
A new triad develops: the traditional Oedipal triad would be mother-mother’s mother-and-father, and mother-father-newborn. The emerging triad is newborn-mother-mother’s mother. It’s sort of like the new-mother receiving permission to become a mother for herself The author of this book claims that this triad is not Freudian in nature, so there is no penis envy and replacement of the penis with a child. Instead, when women become mothers, at least in our culture, several themes emerge:
Each theme involves an organized
set of ideas/wishes/memories and motives that will influence the mother’s
feelings/actions/interactions
Motherhood constellation is not universal. The hormonal/psychobiological is universal but not the motherhood state across cultures/times/places. Our society places emphasis on:
Not all women will develop
the maternal constellation – and society will allow for some
variability – but only to a limit before being labeled “child abuse” or bizarre.
Component Themes of the Motherhood Constellation
-mother-infant psychotherapy
themes emerge even before the birth of the child!
The Life-Growth theme: i.e. can she sustain/promote the baby’s growth
Mother wonders if she will
succeed in sustaining her child, as this is often used as a measure
of her own success. This is a normal fear (will her baby survive). The
reverse in this fear is “murder by profound inadequacy”, to use
the author’s words. Failing to raise her children has huge implications
for a woman’s self-concept. Though the traditional themes include
individual survival and individual sexual reproduction, it also includes
the species survival, in many women.
Primary Relatedness theme – social-emotional engagement with the baby.
Questions include: can she love her baby? Does she feel the baby’s love? Can she enter a “primary maternal preoccupation” [Winnicott- identification with the baby i.e. heightened sensitivity. This is a preverbal pre-symbolic relatedness, i.e. reading the baby needs. This means attachment and regulating the child’s rhythm, induction of basic rules of human interactions and “holding” the baby]?
Mothers may be fearful of failures in this task, which is very culturally defined, yet may also be very different than mother’s own personal learnings.
Supporting Matrix theme – getting the support system in order to achieve the first two tasks (keeping baby alive and promoting psychic-affective development)
-a protective social matrix
is important so that the mother can focus on the child’s needs through
supporting the care-giving mother. There are two elements to this support:
1) supportive/buffer from external reality/provide for vital needs;
and 2) psychological support and educate re: mothering. Mother needs
to look at internalized and external objects for direction. Mother often
needs a benevolent mother and grandmother, Mr. Hubby (the husband),
can only be that much maternalized. Mother’s relationship to her own
mother gets reactivated and reorganized. By the way, the best predictor
of attachment between other and her baby is how the mother currently
speaks of her own mother and experiences of being mothered. Clinical
questions around this include: is mother enmeshed/autonomous from/rejecting
of her relationship with her own mother? The internalized mother-objects
get re-evaluated during the emergent motherhood.
Fears in this stage include
the failure to create or keep the supporting matrix, or whether the
matrix will be unhelpful/bashing/critical? The cost of the support matrix
may be high. i.e. mother may be paying with dependency/fusion. This
price takes a toll on the mother’s autonomy, self-esteem, dignity,
etc…
Husband may compete with baby
for the mother/wife’s attention. Motgher may fear that the seeming
“over-parenting” may make the lonely husband leave, and possibly
seek the attention with another partner. Therefore, success in the supporting
matrix will also require ongoing successful renegotiation of the relationship
between mother/wife and husband.
Women tend to be better able
to serve as supports for new-mother.
Supporting Matrix theme
With the birth of a new baby, the woman’s identity shifts from:
Reworking/shifting the identity
to the current situation is important for the completion of the other
tasks. Allocation of energy/time/energy must shift, which involves mental
work.
-the intergenerational transmission
process takes place and are based on a remembering context.
The present remembering context and its role in identity transformations
Memory is often procedural.
A person will procedurally know how to do something (i.e. soothe an
infant), based in procedural memory from pre-episodic memory of the
now-adult’s own life. So a parent will do the action in a similar
fashion than done to him/her, even though there is no declarative memory
of it. The maternal-care-giving situation may invoke some strong memories,
some of them quite episodic and declarative. The maternal care-giving
situations are not regressional but a powerful invoker of schematic
memory.
Nature of the Motherhood Constellation
A life phase is defined
as a developmental stage with new tasks, concerns and capacities. It
is not a new psychic organization, as it merely re-orients/elaborates
and extends the existing order. Motherhood does create a new psychic
organization
Clinical implications of the Motherhood Constellation
We cannot use the traditional
view of working through transference with new-mother clients. Motherhood
difficulties including the transference (i.e. wanting to be supported/etc.
by a maternal figure, and they usually get this from other mothers).
The “good grandmother transference” is that wish to have
a supporting maternal figure. Therapists may have a hard time with this
transference, in that they need to remember that this is not just another
form of psychoneurotic transference. But those therapists have to remember
that this is really part of the mother constellation
which means that the therapist has to be supportive of this positive
transference. Not all transference is shitty. Therefore, therapists
have to facilitate and act therapeutically and facilitate psychodynamically
guided exploration if they were to support the motherhood constellation
transference. Ignoring the maternal constellation transference
leads to a therapeutic wound which at best supports disappearing of
the symptom, based on client’s avoidance. Therapist is therefore to
be a form of the supporting matrix: validate/support/appreciate and
“hold” the mother, perhaps promoting that corrective experience
necessary for positive change.
Implications for fathers
Partners who have traditional
roles: fathers are less able to be supportive of the new-mother due
to his massively un-maternal role. In the couple where the roles are
more equal, the husband is able to be of some maternal support, but
his advice/validating capacities are limited in the fact that he never
had the maternal or female experiences (writer’s comment: and as of
2010, statistically is unlikely to even eventually have it).
The equality-based husbands
may be on the disadvantage – he might give up half of his work to
share in the child-rearing, but at first, mother may want to be with
the child more than half her share.
When the extended family is
virtually non-existent, the husband can never fully replace the matrix
of support… firstly just because he cannot fully validate the new-mother’s
situation by virtue of the fact that he was not raised as a woman.