Bonus Mother's Day Post!
Hate is false repair, the Eternal Maternal is a container for more
This Mother’s Day I’m not with my kids or my mother, but in Toronto with colleagues. I’m not mad about it though, as this brought its own kind of recognition of the maternal. One of the organizations I’m a part of — the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy — had its annual conference this weekend where we focused on a very relevant theme: Hate. I came with a psychoanalytic study group I’m a part of, to talk about hate as a false repair of pain and the traumas that have been more overwhelming than the care that was available. Hate as false repair.
Into this space I brought my eternal question: Where is the maternal?
I’m sharing some of my reflections with you here, in honor of Mother’s Day and the professional mothers who have helped me develop a capacity to truly think. I am especially mindful of their importance here in this context, where several of my feminine mentors gathered. Their epistemologies and ways of holding space are, to my mind, inseparable from their womanliness.
Jill Gentile, who sometimes refers to herself as a “vagina evangelist,” spoke about hate as always relational. It is always tied to inequality, she said, whether it seeks to upend this inequality or to reinforce it. In this way hate can be “democracy’s lover,” a force activated to upend marginalization; or an “anti-democratic hate.” In her talk, Jessica Benjamin invoked Greek mythology extending beyond the Oedipal myth of Freud’s telling, to include the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes. She noted that the known narrators of this mythology have insisted on a taming of the Furies who would shriek and lament the loss of this mother, except that they have been portrayed as ugly and irrational. Our collective feminine fury has been disavowed. Her voice opened up a different line of thinking: What if we did not normalize matricide? What if we stopped the killing, and mourned the loss of the mother?
The presence of these and so many other brilliant women is in stark contrast to the lack of female leadership I experienced growing up in parochial schools, including my graduate school. Female voices were absent from leadership, from the halls of thought, for so many years of my life. Honoring those who are here now is also a mourning for those who were not. It remains much harder to speak about an absence or why it exists, but we must at least name when there is such an absence.
I’m also reminded of a week I spent with Luce Irigaray who is a genius of linguistics to conceptualize society’s relationship to the feminine. But the most memorable thing she said to me in all our time was that “You must remember your mother. You spent nine months in her womb, and she is the reason you have life.” Today, even though there are so many things my mother and I are not prepared to speak about together, I honor her life and her gifts. Without her, I would not be.
In my group presentation today, we reflected in different voices about a woman’s hatred of those from a different racialized group. This was the father’s mandate, whereas the mother’s voice was silent. It’s been a gift to track and support the changes in this one person’s life, but I want to share with you the ways these dynamics are relevant far beyond one individual person. Specifically, what is lost when the maternal seems absent, and how hate can transform when a maternal function is allowed to be present.
What is typically referred to as the maternal allows for mourning, but the maternal function is often violently oppressed by a patriarchal view, perpetuating a belief that only hatred and exclusion can protect us. The lie of hate’s protection is revealed when we see the bigger lie, that the maternal is not truly absent.
According to dissociation theory, everyone has states identified as “Me” and others disavowed as “Not-Me.” But these identifications and disavowals are not things we come up with ourselves, they are relationally formed, and “Me” and “Not-Me” states have concentric, generational layers. Developed in family systems and identity groups, these states are that much stronger because they carry the force of the collective. Increasingly, powerful sociopolitical forces are encouraging people to dis-identify with vulnerability. As one example, in an interview with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk said that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” This coincides with moves toward fascism, as if hatred and destruction of the hated ones is the only form of protection we have left. Such a patriarchal view prides itself on inclusion, so long as it denies vulnerability, and in doing so denies the maternal.
You are probably aware of the recent CNN report on what has been dubbed “rape academy.” The report revealed that tens of thousands of videos had been posted to a site called “Motherless,” videos in which men lifted the eyelids of their drugged wives to prove they were fully unconscious before raping them on tape. Remember that name of this site is “Motherless,” even though surely many of the women harmed are in fact mothers and the men using this site have had mothering experiences. What is notable here is that even where the maternal function is present, it is so routinely projected out, denied, controlled, and overpowered to such a degree that rape is commonplace in our culture. Care for vulnerability is violently dissociated, “Not Us,” a proclamation has been made that there is no mother here. Just this week the site was taken down by Dutch government authorities. In response, one online commentator said, “the world is Motherful again.”
In the absence or disavowal of a maternal container, vulnerability becomes helplessness and is wont to be dissociated and avoided at all costs, particularly when that helpless vulnerability has been devastating in the past. Where vulnerability and trauma have exceeded our ability to contain and hence caused an inability to mourn, we can become fully aligned with invincibility, aggressive, and almost intent on destroying vulnerability in ourselves and others.
We must mourn the loss of the mother — whether that is our personal mothers who have hurt us, those mothers who did much good but couldn’t possibly hold the tragedies of exile and genocide, or mothers who are deceased or sick or silenced.
But in doing so we can connect to the eternal maternal, the source of all life. We can identify again with vulnerability as well as with care. These things are “Me.” The maternal can be re-constituted, and re-found. It is possible to mourn instead of relying on hate to keep us safe, which means it may also be possible to love more than we have known.