Ideology and Resistance
Over a century ago, in his early work on hysteria, Freud had implicated sexual violation, or childhood seduction, as an aberration linked to later adult psychopathology. During his subsequent researches, however, he noticed the universality of certain sexual themes in the psychic life of men and women, and made the discovery of the psychosexual life of children, and subsequently also the Oedipal phantasies that accompany this life. No longer were memories of seduction to be taken only as literal expositions of early trauma. Rather, these sexual memories were now associated with a perceived reality, constructed within the complex psychological matrix of early development. In the processes of healing, this domain of intrapsychic reality became the main arena of intervention. Reality per se had a lesser significance, except as it was experienced through the mental and sensory apparatus of the infant/ child (Freud, 1905, 1924, 1925, 1933).
For many reasons that will be explored below, the reality of incest and perversion, most particularly by mothers, seemed to recede from social and clinical consciousness. But as Welldon (2004) in her book on female perversions asks, “Do mothers commit incest more frequently than we think, and more at the mother’s initiative than we imagine? Are we blocked from perceiving this by our idealisation of motherhood? Surely we are, and this is why even in the original oedipal situation we fail to notice Jacosta’s (that is, Oedipus’ mother) responsibility. Hers is the most important case of incest.” (p. 85)(brackets mine).
I made some informal inquiries with Childline and RAPCAN, both organisations involved in the frontline battle against sexual abuse. Although there are no hard statistics available from either source, both sources said that reporting of cases of maternal sexual abuse was “extremely rare”. The meaning of this is, of course, ambiguous. Is this because it does not happen? Is this because it happens and is not reported? Is this because it happens but is not conceptualised as abuse, and hence not reported?
It is interesting how the history of abuse has shifted over the years. Into the second half of the twentieth century, with psychoanalysis in full swing, feminism leapt into prominence. It became an influential discourse that claimed it had the most accurate analysis of social and sexual relations. Instinct, femininity-masculinity, role diversion, and suggestions of innate differences between the sexes was not always comfortably received. Instead, male-female difference was viewed as derived from an ideological position, in which we were all socialised, that generally led to the oppression of women. In this view, the world found itself divided primarily into two camps – men on the one side and women on the other – in which women were the victims, oppressed by a universally-culpable male species who subjugated both women in general and their own specific women. The latter fell into a category of women who through false-consciousness chose husbands over whom they exerted little power, instead becoming domestically oppressed through socialisation processes engineered by ‘patriarchal-dominant’ ideology, culture, and power relations.
In this scenario, sexual and domestic abuse was inevitably perpetrated by men who wielded inordinately unbalanced power in their social relations. The (once again) innocent women and children were the victims. Almost by definition, the phallus was the symbol of oppressive power relations and of sexual power and abuse. Women could not perpetrate abuse because women did not possess the phallus. Psychoanalysis made it abundantly clear that mothers could emotionally screw up their children but the prevailing intellectual ideology argued that they could not screw them.
Maternal Seduction
It has long been recognised in psychoanalytic observation that mothers play the most significant role in the infant’s mental and physical life. Pre-oedipal development is jam-packed with psychological exchanges. Primitive object relating is finely tuned between mother and infant and initial bonding is as if the infant and mother are as one, contained in what Mahler describes as a ‘symbiotic orbit’ (Mahler, Pine & Bergman, 1975). Mother and infant are as extensions to each other. Klein (1975), Winnicott (1965), Mahler, et al. (1975) and other authors have described how this mental extension involves the mutual exchange of mental contents and other unconscious projections. It is useful to remember that this mental exchange, of which we are now so familiar in psychoanalysis, rests upon and is also mirrored in a physical symbiosis and exchange. For both mother and infant, there is the sharing and exchanging of physical pleasures and sensations. Generally, this is in a form that is normal and healthy for development. We need not linger in this regard − the infant derives pleasure from the mother’s soothing caresses and skin on skin contact between them − the meeting of healthy sensory needs takes place for the infant and this is essential for mental growth.
However, it is not only the infant that can benefit from the sharing of physical sensations − nor of the potential phantasy/ ideation that can accompany them. Many mothers report the pleasurable sensations of breast feeding, the soothing joy of feeling their baby’s skin on theirs, or the warm fulfilment from holding and touching their child’s body. We need not linger here either, since in the normal course of development this form of sharing is held within appropriate boundaries and the child’s benefit from such physical exchanges, even where it is highly charged with semi-erotic and libidinal energy, outweighs any bad that might accrue.
From the perspective of the infant, Freud argued that following libidinal cathexis with the breast, such energy is later generalised to the mother as a whole being. “This first object is later completed into the person of the child’s mother, who not only nourishes it but also looks after it and thus arouses in it a number of other physical sensations, pleasurable and unpleasurable. By her care of the child’s body she becomes the first seducer. In these two relations lies the root of mother’s importance, unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and as the prototype for all later love relations – for both sexes” (Freud, 1938, p. 423).This “seduction” is well and good, and most theorists would agree that it is also essential in nourishing the child’s psycho-physical development. It is the energy which assists in establishing healthy prototypical imagos on which future relating will be built. But it is also not difficult to see that the distance between desirable and undesirable mothering is narrow. With even slight aberration, a desirable state of appropriate physical and erotic sensation, of caressing and stimulation, becomes undesirable − one in which creeping abuse is engendered in the guise of mothering. In some cases, as we shall explore below, maternal practices, sometimes hidden from view but sometimes quite open, are such flagrant violations of appropriate boundaries that were a father/ man to be caught doing anything close to them he would be imprisoned. A father having intercourse with his adolescent daughter for years? Likely consequence: jail. A mother doing so with her adolescent son? Likely consequence: according to cases reviewed in the literature, counselling.
The maternal domain appears to carry a certain liberty. Socially and psychologically, acceptance of a mother’s prerogative runs deep. Her ownership of the somatic zone and ‘right of access’ beyond the normal body boundary of a child is generally a given in cultural discourse. For reasons we will return to shortly, it appears as if mothers are not, and can not be sexual abusers. However, the clinical context often brings into view that which is hidden in the ideological or cultural world. Clinically, there is a finer line between what is ‘mothering’ and what is serving some deeper sexual or psychological need of the mother.
This distinction raises two questions: can mothers use their children for their own sexual gratifications? And do some, occasionally, do so under the guise of mothering?
There is not much to draw on to answer these questions apart from two main sources: (i) clinical or observational evidence; and (ii) by a comparison of our reaction and interpretation of these experiences if the parental player in the experiences was switched from mother to father. I intend to visit both these issues to bring into focus an area of mother-child interaction that appears to be protected from view – but not necessarily because it is always invisible. Rather, even the obvious can be effected by resistances in our minds that extend themselves from the internal (our blind spots and taboos) and influence the external through prevailing intellectual ideologies. As Welldon has argued, “Two decades on (from the 60’s when maternal battery of their babies was denied), we are similarly failing to admit the possibility of maternal incest. Everyone is ready to recognise paternal incest… but not what mothers do. Nobody believes it is happening – sometimes even to the mother’s chagrin” (p. 10).
Even now, there is not much to suggest any difference in these perceptions. Using a great deal of clinical material to back her case, Welldon argues, “The function of motherhood has given some women the opportunity to exercise ‘perverting’ attitudes towards their babies, using them as extensions of their own bodies for unconscious needs of their own. These phenomena are a result of combined psychological, physiological, biological, social, historical, and cultural factors. But considerations of the same general kind have prevented us from fully acknowledging female perverse behaviour. We have all become silent conspirators in a system in which change could not be envisaged since no one would acknowledge that such behaviour existed. This failure has deprived some women of a better understanding of their difficulties”. (p. 16).I wish to propose some thoughts on why maternal sexual abuse might be a blind spot, the acknowledgement of which is strongly resisted. After all, how could the archetypal image of the mother be motivated by anything other than the good of the child?
Clinical and Observational Material
Before doing so, however, I wish to present various samples of events and incidences that raise questions about sexual abuse in the guise of mothering. I will not discuss these cases in any detail, nor present a formulation of the dynamics at work within these family systems. My intention at this stage is to merely present them as samples of the phenomenon I am addressing.
Following on from a comment by a colleague on a draft of this paper, I became aware that all material I have encountered of maternal violation is clinically through recollection by the child of that parent, or through direct observation outside the consulting room. Welldon in her work, however (perhaps facilitated by being a woman therapist), has dealt with some staggering examples of abuse by mothers, reported first hand by the mothers in their attempts to seek treatment. One mother, for example, reported to her that she had initiated her adolescent son “in the art of making love – teaching him step by step over a period of time what to do and how to do it. I created the most wonderful lover”, she said, “and both of us were in ecstasy. This has lasted all these years”. Another regularly caressed the genitals of her four daughters because “it was easier than a dummy”. Another mother (reported by Shengold, 1980) had been obsessed with ministrations to her son’s body as a child, forgetting about him during latency, and then becoming intensely curious and intrusive towards him in adolescence. She seduced him repeatedly over a period of weeks, with mother achieving orgasms from the encounters, while the son was unable to reach ejaculation. At a later point, when the boy had his first ejaculation during sexual intercourse with the mother, this brought an abrupt end to the seduction – which was never mentioned again.
By way of a thought experiment, the reader is requested to imagine any and all of these vignettes by way of replacing the mother in each example with the father and assessing whether such behaviour would be condoned under any circumstances, even well-intentioned ones.
My own experiences with such reports are quite simply milder than these dramatic examples – yet have nevertheless disturbed me. This is because they are seldom reported as cases of abuse and rarely even conceptualised as abuse. The milder form of maternal sexual transgression appears in the form of oedipal enmeshments that begin pre-oedipally at mother’s initiation or in response to separation anxieties that are then transformed for mother’s benefit. These involve sleeping in the same bed with the child, often well beyond infancy, and in some cases well into latency and even adolescence. In many of these cases, the father is relegated to mother’s emotional and oftentimes erotic sidelines, either sleeping in the spare room or in separate houses (especially through divorce).
One mother spoke openly of her love of her 3 year old son’s body and how much she enjoyed “spooning” him in bed, feeling his body against hers. Father thought this quite normal, perhaps even an example of what good mothers do, and accepted those nights when he slept in the other room.
Another case of this dynamic which did not resolve was of a divorced mother who lived alone with her only son. Throughout his life and into early adolescence (last point of information) she slept in the same bed with him. Would this be accepted if the roles were a father and his daughter, no matter how innocent his intentions?
This form (of what we might describe as) relatively passive intimacy, is not always true of such cases. Sexualised interaction and eroticised emotional contact is often of quite an active type. One example of this type of (limited) active contact was of the mother that taught her 5 year old son that his “private parts” were his and not to be touched by anyone else. However, whilst mother and son were bathing together, she reached out to pull and touch his penis. The boy said, “but mommy, you told me no-one is allowed to touch my privates!” – to which mother replied, “that only applies to others. I am your mother – I’m allowed to touch it!” Such playfulness, perhaps tinged with eroticism for the mother, is dismissed quite openly as fun and games. Of course, if a father did that to his daughter in the bath, he’d be arrested.
There are examples of dubious agendas in some actions that are more directly legitimised as mothering. One patient reported their mother’s regular inspections of all their orifices, and in one case the frequent use of anal suppositories for illness – which created some anal cathexis and deep anxieties for the child in a context of a controlling and often aggressive mother. His subsequent personality also developed into a classic anal, obsessive-compulsive type personality. The legitimacy of pushing suppositories into the anal orifice, whilst perhaps legitimate on medical grounds, might also have carried some unconscious erotic-aggressive agenda. By age 40 years, this man had managed to kiss a few women but had never had a sexual relationship with anyone.
There are those cases where the mother inverts the maternal relationship to the child, instead inducing a mother role into the child. In some cases this extends beyond the emotional. In one case, the mother would call the child to her and insist she lift her shirt so that mother could suckle the child’s (still undeveloped) breasts. This “game” continued for around 3 years, beginning during the early oedipal phase (and was sometimes carried out in the company of another adult).
In some cases this sort of practice extends to more sexualised “play” – such as a mother who was fond of “French kissing” her son (aged 3-5 years). In front of her husband (who thought it funny) and guests at dinner (who thought is odd but said nothing) this mother would call her boy to her and quite overtly ‘tongue-kiss’ him. Other sexualised comments about his penis and “little erections” often formed part of this activity, as did innuendos about her wishes with the child.
One patient reported her mother’s periodic focus on her vagina. On one occasion, in early adolescence, mother performed a ‘ritual’ (never understood by the patient) of insisting the patient lie on the bed with her legs apart whilst she stuffed bits of soap into her vagina in some form of ‘cleansing’ ritual.
Another, in later adolescence, was taken by her mother to her General Practitioner for a vaginal examination to check whether she had lost her virginity. The GP colluded with this activity by examining her and traumatising her.
The interesting aspect to many of these examples is the often public display of these activities or at least openness in talking or joking about them and the apparent collusion by husbands, friends, other family, or occasionally professionals.
Case Vignette
Susan presented as a vivacious, intelligent woman of 30 years old, working as a bookkeeper for a large financial company. She described a tendency toward abusive, masochistic relationships with men. Despite an apparent long term stability in some of these, ‘volatile’ and ‘abusive’ more accurately captures their character. She had been given STD’s by one of these men, and had an affair with her boss that served a compulsive need for a life of drama. Alcohol abuse in the form of cascade drinking accompanied by a fear of a compulsive loss of her sexual impulses, doing something uncontrolled with a man, also characterised her. She had an earlier history of bulimia, and other forms of masochistic abuse through dieting, excessive exercise, and sex.
Susan began to display a charged erotic energy from the beginning of the therapy which was tinged with dependency and attachment issues. A needy little girl seemed to co-exist with her internal abusive objects, compartmentalising parts of self in a managed but fragmented manner. She found stillness suffocating, but was confused by her positive experiences of sexual abuse and tendency to relive this through sex with men. More than men, she feared her own sexuality and it’s somewhat compulsive energy. Beneath her strong femme fatale tendency, was a deeply sad and afraid part, full of tears and anxiety about the collapse of her facades. At one level her sexuality was deeply connected to men – especially older men like father, teachers, doctors, bosses, therapists and such, and a deep rivalry with women. It is unclear how the multiple distortions in her life combined but this patient also had a deep fear of her mother, who performed various sexualised rituals on her, in the form of putting objects into her vagina in early adolescence. She was also hauled off to doctors for various sexualised examinations at the mothers behest, which she found humiliating and traumatic, especially given the professional’s collusion with entirely unnecessary examinations. Of interest, is that in adulthood her body reflected her conflicted sexuality in the form of constant fungal infections and extreme pain associated with other STD’s. Her internal world was characterised by a deep inner void, self-hate, and a tendency to kill her internal objects, including in the transference relationship. Time off work was characterised by a profound sense of anxiety and at times suicidal ideation, but without intent. Whilst a larger than life energy was at times present in the room, so too was a deep and profound resistance to any form of attachment, especially of an emotional nature.
Susan’s difficulty with transference attachment made it difficult to fully explore the sexualised abuse she had experienced at mother’s hand, especially because of the difficulty she had in formulating these experiences as “abuse”. Can a mother sexually abuse her own child? she wondered. In fact, can a mother abuse at all?
Can Mothers Abuse?
“Odd though it may sound”, says Welldon, “motherhood provides an excellent vehicle for some women to exercise perverse and perverting attitudes towards their offspring, and to retaliate against their own mothers”. (p. 63).
Yet, for both men and women there appears to be a fundamental resistance to the idea that mothers (and women in general) can initiate sexual perversion, least of all with their own children. This resistance is partly captured by feminist theory that has been dominant in western culture over the past few decades. I will dwell on this viewpoint, because I think it captures certain psychological trends related to this resistance.
It is a position that assumes a “male-supremacism”, “patriarchy”, and “power” that men wield in the social and psychological order. It is one in which women are, by definition of this view, the passive victims of a culturally derived inequity in power.
This position is captured by Andrea Dworkin’s (Dworkin, 1982) exposition of male “supremacy”. She argues various fundamental tenets of male power which enable her to describe/create a split between the good and the bad, the abuser and the victim. This position appears to have similarities in Klein’s view of the split of the good and the bad breast, on which I will elaborate later.
Dworkin argues that there are various tenets of our society imbedded in male supremacism that demonstrates this split:The first tenet of male-“supremacist” ideology, Dworkin argues, is that men have this “self”, an apriori, absolute metaphysical assertion of “I am”, and that women must, by definition, lack it. “I want and I am entitled to have, therefore I am”. As the boy matures he is encouraged to make the treacherous and apparently “normal adjustment”, that is to transfer his “parasitism of the mother to other females, who have more succulent selves to which they are not entitled”.
Power of men is also physical strength used over and against others less strong, that is women and children. Power involves the capacity to terrorise, to use self and strength to inculcate fear, fear in a whole class of persons of a whole class of persons – this including sexual abuse. Men also have a “great and sublime power” to name – according to the author enabling them to define experience, and to ultimately control perception itself, and upheld by force “pure and simple”. Men also have the power of owning, and, according to Dworkin this power is historically absolute (read, split into good and bad) and enforced through subjugation of women because men claim ownership of them as possessions of power. The power of money is added to her list and seen as controlled by men. Men use money as power as sexual control. Women have not and therefore do not. Men also have the power of sex and accordingly, “sexual power is also an attribute of the male, something that inheres in him as a taker of what he wants and needs, especially as one who uses his penis to take women, but more generally as a taker of land, of money. As an attribute, his sexual power illuminates his very nature” (p. 24).
The final, seventh tenet of “male supremacy” that she argues is that “sexual power authentically originates in the penis”. (p.24). This last point is particularly important, and I will return to it later.
Eichenbaum and Orbach, in their well known book Understanding Women (1983), pick up this position, arguing that women’s “second-class position in patriarchal culture” is reflected in their psychology. Women do not feel whole, confident in themselves, feel less than equal, feel like children, not adults, feel powerless, overdependent, passive, imprisoned by their anger and by the clouds of depression that surround them. Women, by implication, are infantilised victims of men. This experience of women, all women, according to the authors, translates into their sexuality – where women report “a fear of being satisfied and given to”. It evokes an ingrained need to defer to other’s needs. Even when the opportunity presents itself, say the authors, with a willing and giving partner, it may be terribly difficult for a woman to ask for or take pleasure. She feels like she is there for her lover and sees herself through her lover’s eyes. “Once again we see a woman not being in her own skin, involved with her own needs and pleasure, but rather involved in the needs and pleasure of another, with her own unmet needs providing the basis from which she gives”.
Again, we are told that women are selfless sexually, do not prioritise nor express their sexuality for their own sake, and by this definition, presumably, would not, and psychologically cannot, manifest perversion as an extension of their own selfish needs for sexual gratification. Women are passive not active. Women are innocent, not guilty. Women are the victims of patriarchy, sometimes even victims of their own psychology as a by-product of this, but woman is not the active one, the co-creator of relationship dynamics, the initiator of abuse. “For many women” write the authors, “the melting of physical boundaries is a terrifying prospect. They feel they will be engulfed by a lover and lose themselves” (p. 156). Women are socialised to nurture, and in so doing “place their own needs second”.
The major problem with this sort of thinking, is that the nature of a women’s sexuality, and hence perversion, is not acknowledged, something asserted by authors such as Welldon, Rascovsky and Rascovsky (1968) Granoff and Perrier (1980), Lothstein, and other authors cited by Welldon. A woman’s perversion, being directed at herself and her internal organs, extend these perverse aims to the part-self, in her baby. The baby may be her transitional object, or the missing phallus, which by extension becomes her ‘toy’, ‘thing’, part object as perversion. The baby is the extension of her own body, at which, according to Weldon, the perverse impulses may be aimed in women. Motherhood, therefore, provides the opportunity for complete control in which fertile ground is possible for damaged women to exploit and abuse their own babies. Welldon argues,“Is this again an obstinate tendency to see women as the weak sex, always the victim and never the perpetrators of sexual assault? Women have always been held to be incapable of effecting their own perverse sexual designs, and young boys reckoned to be the only ones to enact sexual fantasies. I believe that many theories of female sexual development are ill-founded, partly through their being based on a need for an ever-present ‘earth-mother’, a woman who has been so idealised or perhaps even idolised that her faults are overlooked. She is portrayed as powerless in the penis-envy dilemma or, according to the new feminists, the victims of social attitudes, even perhaps contemptible because she seems of less importance than the male. It looks as if we have all become silent conspirators in a system which, from whatever angle we look at them, women are either dispossessed of all power or made the sexual objects and victims of their male counterparts. We do not accord them any sense of responsibility for their own unique functions, deeply related to fecundity and motherhood, and liable at times to manifest themselves perversely” (p. 86).
Feminist analyses such as those represented above (e.g. Dworkin, Eichenbaum & Orbach), have contributed to a “glorification of motherhood and its refusal even to consider that it may have a dark side” (Welldon, pp 78-79). Prevailing ideologies have tended to promote the idea – the sense - that society is divided into a split:- patriarchal abusers on the one hand and victims on the other. Since power and abuse, by definition and by exposition rest in the phallus, and since only men have a phallus, it follows that only men can be abusers and only men can cross boundaries.
However, the clinical evidence that women can and do abuse is plentiful and compelling when it is written about, which is not often. Male perversions and abuse, which is written about extensively, tends to involve part objects that are externalised. In female perversion the use of the whole body is involved, given the nature of female sexuality, and by extension also its mental representations. A baby, which represents part of her inner body and its sexual organs, her symbolised inner world too, can easily forfeit its space as an independent but co-dependent being, and instead absorb abuse as a ready-made extension of the mother’s own body-psyche. If perversion in a man is focused through his penis, says Welldon, in a woman it can similarly be expressed through her reproductive organs, with her whole body, since her reproductive organs are much more widespread and their manifestation is more apparent.
Ideological Splitting
Dworkin’s polarised analysis, which we explored above, might appear to wrestle with complexity. But for decades this view represented the underpinnings of a powerful position in feminist theory/ideology, one which in turn had an influence on social consciousness. My contention, which I will deal with later, is that ideological splitting of this sort may have roots in early psychological splitting and triangulation.
Some authors have tackled the issue of the feminine/ Mother in more complex ways. For example, in her treatise exploring the relation between feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Gallop (1982) presents the thinking of Kristeva, positing the notion of the “phallic mother”, despite feminist opposition that to speak of a “phallic mother” is to subsume female experience into male categories. This paradox implies that the idyllic space of women together is supposed to exclude the phallus, and that the exclusion of males is sufficient to make a non-phallic space. If Mother is phallic, then she too “must be expelled from the innocent, non-phallic paradise” (p118). The Phallic mother is more dangerous because less obviously phallic, and Gallop sees this view as a “subversion” - through exposure of the phallus of the phallic mother. According to Kristeva, however, the phallic position cannot be avoided.
This is an interesting contest. On the one side Kristeva’s ‘phallic mother’, that implies a textured complexity to the mother’s position, and her possession of both potentials (to be passive/ victim and to be active/abuser) in her relationship to self and child. But Gallop is indignant of this possibility. “It is not enough…”, she says, “to speak the scandal, speak from the scandalous place of the Phallic Mother as self-pleasuring body (as Kristeva does) or the place of the Phallic Authority (as Lacan does). Despite their blatant fraudulence, they will always find believers (among which, above all, the resenters, those most obstinate of believers). The need, the desire, the wish for the Phallus is great. No matter how oppressive its reign, it is much more comforting than no one in command” (p131).
From this point of view, it is fraudulent, it is perverse, it is inconceivable that without some distorted agenda, there could be a view of Mother as perpetrator. Only through the possession of the phallus can aberrance occur, and women do not have it, except through envy of it. On this score, and a more implied one, we are led back to a deep resistance: women are inherently not, on their own, in their nature, abusers. Men are inherently, on their own, in their nature (the possessors of the phallus), abusers.
We arrive back, perhaps, at the dichotomous weak-powerful, abuser-victim, men-women split. It is interesting that from wherever we set out, we seem to arrive back at the splitting – perhaps as a resistance that preserves the purity of the maternal object? This split may indirectly tap into a deeper aspect of unconscious wish fulfilment and resistance that I wish to explore.
Splitting and Maternal Preservation
At the deepest core of the infant’s psyche is the wish to sift the bad from the good and to decontaminate its source of nourishment. If the mother/ breast is bad, psychical and physical life would be threatened. This is because mother is in almost every way in the earlier stages of life, the sole and essential source and insurer of survival. The good must be preserved and the bad expelled. Klein’s primitive splitting defence (St Clair, 1996) enables the bad to be extracted from the good and to be expunged. Survival, sustenance, life itself is preserved and protected through the good breast-mother.
For the infant, recognising this may not be easy either. Failure of innocence is often beyond the pale, and quite simply intolerable. Whilst there is always ambivalent struggle with positive and negative affects, the infant’s instinct is to protect the mother from being destroyed by its own hostility. These manoeuvres are very individualised, depending on the nuances between mother and child and the infant’s developing personality. In protecting the maternal object from annihilation, there are usually such options as repression available to the infant – but this is not always possible. Sometimes, an infant’s projections and projective identifications are not dealt with or metabolised adequately and must find a home external to the self, and away from the prized, primary love-object. During these moments of crisis, then, there is the possibility that these cases may utilise the father as a repository, sometimes pathologically. But pathological or not, I would suggest that the general tendency in development is to do so and this dynamic rests on projection and ‘thirdness’.
Developmentally, the awareness of a ‘third’ existing outside the symbiotic orbit of infant-mother has been argued by authors such as Klein to exist within the first months of life (Klein, 1945). According to her, pre-oedipal struggles, primarily at the breast during the oral phase, form the basis of subsequent developments during the oedipal stage proper. In this early oral period, unconscious phantasies of the penis and vagina (which are presumed to exist through an innate knowledge) provide the unconscious tools through which reparation for oral frustrations can occur. Phantasies of incorporation of the penis in this period, for example, are assumed to form part of the infant’s psychological method of compensating for frustrations at the breast and for alleviating the pressures of its sadistic impulses. “The breast and the penis are, therefore”, says Klein, “the primary objects of the infant’s oral desires” (Klein, 1945, p.65). This triangulation is regarded as forming the basis for possible early oral-oedipal compensation. Further, problems during this developmental phase may interfere with and carry over into later normal adjustments during the phallic phase of the oedipal period proper. “In consequence”, she says, “the Oedipus development is interfered with and the genital organisation cannot be securely established”. (pp 63-64).
Klein’s view assists in establishing the notion of thirdness being incorporated into the mother-infant two-ness. Whilst the third, that is the father-penis, can be incorporated as a compensatory function for good, so too, we might see, it can be utilised as a defensive adjunct to other inadequate defensive manoeuvres. Protection of the maternal object may involve the expulsion of hostility away from the breast and into the penis-father which can carry it away from the symbiotic orbit.
Father is a third and more dispensable object, one intimately (and Klein may say innately) at hand. He may find himself becoming an auxiliary reservoir, usually for metabolising the bad. But as a result, he may also be experienced as capable of potential perpetration and attack – that is, a paranoid response by the infant to the infant’s projections. The mother can remain pure, innocent, and protected from them. If this is not resolved adequately, phallus-father-men may continue to represent bad projections which linger into later oedipal developments, into adult life, and into broader social ideologies. Father-men then may be susceptible to holding the projection of the ‘bad phallus’.
At a deep level of instinct therefore, the gradual development of the perpetrator of abuse resting in the phallus may become embedded in the psyche as a manoeuvre of maternal protection. The maternal object is ‘purified’. Bad comes to rest in the dad. And with that manoeuvre, the phallus may be endowed with more than its own stuff.
For Klein, if persecutory feelings exist in the paranoid-schizoid position, they are a result of bad feelings projected outwards, and often into the mother. Persecutory anxieties can result, therefore, from perceiving the bad feelings as outside the self, evacuated, and hence belonging to the Other. As the child develops, these may be re-introjected and the good and bad integrated as the depressive position takes hold. Failure to complete this developmental phase, may lead to the preservation of the internal tendency to polarise/ split the world into good-bad. Preservation of the mother as good means that bad feelings may at times find an outlet in the early awareness of the father as a significant emotional, though peripheral object. And often, this diversion of negative affect is facilitated by the mother.
As painful as it may be to some, as an object father begins as and remains to some extent dispensable. From almost every angle, physical and psychological, the mother begins as and remains the primary source of sustenance and survival. She is indispensable. Mother is in the immediate dyad – father is the ‘third’.
Objections to this are understandable – many examples demonstrate that lost mothers do not guarantee an infant’s demise, nor are the losses of fathers simply brushed off as insignificant. But the natural tendency − the optimum direction in which the human psyche wishes to go − is to first and foremost preserve and protect the primary source of all. This includes both life itself as well as the holder of the vessel necessary for it – the phantasy, at least, of the fountain of all things nourishing, soft, and comforting. And the natural place of the father is as the third who is incorporated both during oral development and in the later oedipal triangle.
The unconscious pressure to preserve the good mother during early oral development may therefore be accompanied later in development by the structural nature of the oedipal triangle proper. During the phallic phase, there is a powerful anxiety approaching consciousness which is directed at the father. Both boys and girls in their divergent paths during the phallic phase experience castration anxiety – for girls this anxiety signals the advent of the oedipal complex, for boys the conclusion of it. From the infant’s point of view the father’s early dispensability, especially if early oral aggression is projected away from the mother and into the phallic-father, may not be accompanied by a strong counter-acting preserving force to balance these anxieties or those later emanating from father’s ‘castration threats’.
This instinct of preservation of mother, or what we might call a ‘primary preservatory need’, may lead to three dynamic issues: (i) that early splitting defences can project badness away from the mother and into the father, not just from the bad breast to the good. (Such splitting can carry over into intellectual discourses). In this case, such splitting helps resist any formulation of women or mothers as abusers, since by definition, the mother lacks a penis (source of bad) with which to abuse; (ii) the taboo around viewing women/ mothers as abusers is connected therefore to a deep individual instinct of preservation of the mother object, coupled with later associations of castration threats that emanate from the father-phallus ; and (iii) at the phylogenetic level, the mother archetype as nourisher and sustainer of humankind, of the womb of recreation, and as co-creator with God, must be preserved to avoid a potential crisis of social and psychological integrity.
Resistance is most powerful when the collective resistance coincides with individual resistance.
Madonna’s Shadow
The manoeuvres discussed above ensure that immediate individual mental survival is facilitated and threats to psychic integrity are diminished. At an archetypal level, this preservation appears to become entrenched in broader ways reflected in culture and ideology. Images of the Madonna as pure and selfless, geared solely to the well-being of her infant, are happy, powerful metaphors of the instinctual need to preserve the mother-object. But as is well known in psychology, phantasy and reality do not always coincide. Mothers can be narcissistic, enraged, and hateful toward their infants. The love is sometimes tainted by feelings of resentment and hostility even in the healthiest of women – how more so in those with difficulties with their own narcissistic injuries. “A child’s intercourse with anyone responsible for his care”, wrote Freud (1905), “affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object.”
We wish, as Freud suggests, to maintain the innocence of the mother.
“A mother would be horrified if she were made aware that all her marks of affection were rousing the child’s sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity. She regards what she does as asexual, ‘pure’ love, since, after all, she avoids applying more excitations to the child’s genitals than are unavoidable in nursery care” (pp. 145-146).
The reality of maternal imperfection, however, is a factor in the tapestry that is weaved between mother and child. Frustrations and imperfect responses to the infant’s needs represent one layer of this reality. But the mother also brings her own narcissistic needs and her own psychological stuff. Some of this may, through projective identification, be deposited into the infant’s psyche who can then carry split-off parts of the mother − a psychological repository, as it were, for maternal issues. A mother’s view that her interactions are “asexual, pure love” is not always commensurate with reality and the unregulated or unresolved elements in her psyche. Her own sexual needs, phantasies, and simple pleasures are inherent in the mothering situation. But the mother’s shadow issues, her own perversions, may be defended against by an investment in the natural position the father occupies, both as a ‘third’ initially and as a repository for later castration anxieties. She may assist the child to project into father bad affects, maintaining the Madonna’s undefiled position.
We have discussed a deep psychological resistance to acknowledging that the phallus is not the sole source of abuse, nor that fathers/men are the guardians of perversion. The lack of a phallus, or as the victims of oedipal ‘castration’, does not mean women are desexualised. Sometimes, her sexual instincts are geared perversely, and mothering may provide the perfect cover for these perversions to be expressed, and which may be toxic for her children. According to Welldon, “victims of either incest or perversion show crippling and lasting effects in their emotional and sexual development; case after case bears this out” (p. 93). But then we are left to wonder, as did Kramer (1980) in her work on maternal abuse: “Why are authors so loath to label sexual stimulation by the mother as incest, and relatively ready to acknowledge paternal incest?” (cited in Welldon).
This deep resistance to seeing mothers as sexual abusers and the need to preserve her means that even when openly flaunted, husbands, friends, family, and sometimes even professionals, seem to view dubious activities as innocuous, playful, and just quirky. ‘Toxic’, ‘violation’, ‘abuse’ are not ready terms that enter consciousness when observing them.
Defences against the loss of the sustaining mother do indeed sustain, and are therefore necessary. Fathers are required, no doubt, in the developmental interests of the child to be more than a supportive auxiliary ego to the nursing mother, but also to take on some of the bad projections that inevitably float around this dyad. None of this is particularly problematic and development could likely not happen optimally any other way – such is Nature’s ingenuity.
But in the final analysis, what is optimum for development need not blind us to what is perverse. There is a need to treat perversion from wherever it comes, recognising that our deepest resistances to connecting them to the mother are not unusual. In fact, they are borne of normal developmental resistances aimed at preservation of the basic source of all.
Conclusion
This paper has sought to open up a simple issue – albeit provocatively − that there is evidence to suggest that maternal sexual abuse occurs and that for the most part we are resistant to acknowledging it. Such abuse is not often discussed, either in the clinical setting or in the literature. This seems to occur for two primary reasons: firstly, there is a deep and instinctive taboo against damaging the innocent/ selfless maternal love object. She is well protected from the recognition of wrong-doing of this sort. This template creates, perhaps, a collective resistance to dealing with this issue, generating ideologies that preserve the mother/ woman as innocent.
Secondly, the father’s role as both dispensable and as auxiliary to the initial mother-child symbiosis, coupled with the phantasised source of castration threats, makes father/ men/ phallus the more likely repository for projections of sexual aggression and perversion.
It is clear that no more nor less than men, women carry sexual instincts, oedipal phantasies, enactments, and perversions. In the natural order, mothers have very direct and intimate access to the bodies of their offspring and can, therefore, enact intimacies with perverse motivations in a framework of mothering and social acceptability. We also know from psychoanalytic investigation that mothers are the central psychological figures in the early infants life, and may, therefore, also play a central role in the infant’s sexual life in its formative years.
This paper has not sought to explore in any detail the nature of these perversions, nor their dynamics. The intention has been a more humble one: to acknowledge this problem, and to suggest reasons we generally fail to do so.
Whilst it is, of course, true that men sexually abuse, and likely more commonly than women, it is also not the entire story. Keeping the reality of maternal seduction in the closet does no more for psychoanalytic awareness and practice than would have been the case had Freud kept his observations of infantile sexuality in the closet. Resistances to such phenomena are arguably embedded in our psyches. But in the end, mothers, as Freud observed, also hold within their hands a form of first seduction. Mostly, this seduction is vital to health. But sometimes, it is not.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to Gavin Ivey for useful comments on a first draft of this paper and to Jennifer Kirk for her helpful criticisms and editorial pointers. Thanks also to Diane Sandler for her recommendation of useful reference material.
References
Dworkin, A. (1982). Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Yorkshire: Women’s Press.Eichenbaum, L. & Orbach, S. (1983). Understanding Women. Reading: Penguin.Freud, S. (1905). ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’. In A. Richards (Ed.), Penguin Edition of On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. London: Penguin (1997).Freud, S. (1924). ‘The dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’. Standard Edition, Vol 19. London: Hogarth.Freud, S. (1925). ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’. Standard Edition, Vol. 19. London: Hogarth.Freud, S. (1933)’New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis’. Standard Edition, Vol. 22. London: Hogarth.Freud, S. (1938). ‘An outline of psychoanalysis’. In A. Dickson (Ed.), Penguin Edition of Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin (1993).Gallop, J. (1982). Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction. London: MacMillan.Klein, M. (1945). ‘The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties’. In J. Steiner (ed), The Oedipus Complex Today: Clinical Implications. London: Karnac. Klein, M.(1975) Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945. New York: Delta.Klein, M (1975). Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946 – 1963. New York: Delta.Mahler, M.S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic.St Clair M. (1996). Object Relations and Self Psychology: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Brooks/ Cole: California.Welldon, E.V. (2004). Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealisation and Denigration of Motherhood. Karnac.Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities.
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