The Way of All Women by Esther Harding

Author:Esther Harding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

1 For a further discussion of this subject the reader is referred to an essay on marriage in C.G. Jung’s The Development of Personality.

2 An English phrase referring to a love which is focused on the cookies in the cupboard rather than on the person who dispenses them.

3 I Ching, p. 171

6. Maternity

The relation of mother and child is so simple that every peasant woman takes it for granted; so full of emotional content that artists, poets and storytellers have been lured by it in every age; so complicated that psychologists are kept busy tracing out its subtle currents and enduring effects. The exploration of the fundamental relation of a child to his mother has led to a widespread consciousness of the factors which go into the building up of an adult’s character and which influence his motives and actions, sometimes consciously, but far more often in a way and to a degree of which he is profoundly unconscious. The conclusions first drawn by psychologists, who based their theories on observations of the unconscious, have now become facts of such common knowledge that modern plays and novels not only take them into account but often base the entire plot on problems arising out of the relation existing between a mother and her child. I say “modern plays.” I might have saved myself the use of the adjective, for not a few classical plays deal likewise with the same fundamental subject. To give typical examples of plots concerned chiefly with this relation, I have but to mention, among classical stories, Oedipus Rex, Elektra, Hamlet and Ruth, and among modern plays and novels, The Silver Cord, Sons and Lovers and Mourning Becomes Electra. But—and here is a strange phenomenon—these examples reflect for the most part the situation from the point of view of the child. It is not easy to find a novel or play which treats the relation from the point of view of the mother. And—a stranger phenomenon still—our textbooks of psychology are concerned chiefly with the complexes and conflicts in the child and deal with these to the almost complete exclusion of the mother’s side of the problem. Women are not unaware today that this discussion is so largely a one-sided affair and they are puzzled by it. “It is hard to be a mother these days,” a woman once said to me. “If you are a ‘bad’ mother your child naturally reproaches you and lays all the blame for his difficulties on your inexpert treatment of him. But if you are a ‘good’ mother you will still not escape blame and reproach. For now it is said that by your very kindness and skillful handling you have bound him to you in an inescapable fixation.”

This is indeed the Scylla and Charybdis of the mother’s problem, for if she is “all mother,” devoting herself to her children’s needs when they are young and identifying herself with their interests as they grow older, she will find that they remain bound to her and to their own childishness.

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