Motherhood in the Twenty-First Century by Mariam Alizade

Author:Mariam Alizade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 2012-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Maternal/feminine: the switch-over

In order to establish a balanced psychic bisexuality, children of both sexes have to accomplish introjective identification with both the primary maternal dimension and the primary feminine one. However, in the case of girls—given their future as women and possible mothers—these introjections have a much more specific importance as regards their bodily ego.

My hypothesis is that, unless she has recourse to some perverse solution or other, the adult woman-and-mother’s cathexis of the maternal and feminine dimensions functions quite naturally in a switch-over or flip-flop fashion, and is marked by feelings of guilt.

Motherhood and femininity, as actual facts in external reality, amount therefore to an illusion of having integrated in the mind the dimensions implied by the maternal and feminine spheres.

Moreover, there are three obscure objects of cathexis: in the first place, the womb; second, that other locus (much debated as to its rightful place in the list of erogenous zones) called the vagina; and, finally, the pregenital locus (so easy to talk about because of its unisex quality) that is the anus. These three are in such close geographical proximity that confusion cannot but be the result; in addition, the representations of how these different organs are cathected by the sex drives are condensed.

Anality is a defence more readily employed by boys and by men, from the perspective of their unisex infantile sexual theory that lays the foundation for the masculine castration complex. Hypochondriasis and depression are defences more usually employed by girls and by women because of their primary identification with the maternal reproductive organs; that identification seals off primary castration with the expulsion that takes place at birth.

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