Abstract
In this article I illustrate the central role of dynamic conflict in the identity changes involved in becoming a mother for the first time. I look in depth at two salient themes in Justine's case: the conflicts between mothering and work and those surrounding separation with her daughter. My analysis of this single case is psycho-social; that is, without reducing to either social or psychological explanations, I attempt to articulate the connections among them. The analysis is informed by a psychoanalytic account of conflict-based unconscious intersubjectivity as a foundation for self-formation and demonstrates how these dynamics work across generations to shape a woman's identity as she becomes a mother. I briefly contrast the mother's experience with the father's. Methodologically, I pay attention to the workings of transference dynamics in the interpretation of empirical interview-based data.
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Notes
The Economic and Social Research Council-funded ‘Identities and Social Action’ programme, directed by Margaret Wetherell. http://www.identities.org.uk.
The FANI method (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000) was one of two methods, the other being psychoanalytically-informed observation (Urwin, 2007).
Thanks to Ann Phoenix for her detailed reading of this paper. The responsibility for the final product is, however, mine.
This necessarily abbreviated vignette summarises the themes that form the basis for my analysis rather than being a comprehensive summary of Justine's case.
To infer unconscious dynamics does not entail a denial of the occurrence of conscious identifications.
This explanation illuminates the limitations of the transference and countertransference terminology, which cannot convey the incessant two-way reciprocal interconnections of unconscious intersubjective dynamics. Nonetheless, the value of the terms lies in how they make central the way earlier significant relationships transfer to the current one, giving a time dimension (generational time, in particular) that is absent from the idea of unconscious communication.
Julia Kristeva (cited in Minsky, 1998, p. 119) captured this conflict when she referred to early mothering as ‘the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself.
Lisa Baraitser's (2009) study of the maternal is notable for its rigorous focus on the ‘child-as-other’.
Separation in general and mother–daughter separation in particular, is widely recognised in the developmental, psychoanalytic and feminist literatures as a potentially difficult developmental task for both parties (Maguire, 1995; Ernst, 1997; Parker, 1995, 1997).
‘A primitive and largely unconscious mode of communication central to learning from experience’ (Bion, cited by Meltzer, 1986, p. 47).
This was the case, to a greater or lesser extent and with more or less conflict, for all the mothers in our sample, who had lived out the relative independence of early adulthood centred on gratifying pleasures and curbed by few, if any, primary responsibilities for others. Employment was a primary site for this privileging of individuality and was profoundly missed by many.
It is outside the scope of this article to consider how culturally specific forms of parenting influence this family, which they are bound to do.
For the psychoanalytic and feminist literatures on this topic, see, for example, Trowell and Etchegoyen (2002) and Benjamin (1998).
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Hollway, W. Conflict in the transitions to becoming a mother: A psycho-social approach. Psychoanal Cult Soc 15, 136–155 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2009.34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2009.34