The Birth Of The Mother

When I, as a wife, a mother, a psychoanalyst question myself about the difficulties encountered in the course of my life, I find that they are all located in or round the mother; in or round that part of psychoanalytic theory that bears on women and the structure of their unconscious. For the business of motherhood is unbearable, buttressed as it is by a theory that is indefensible, in which Freud decides that I as a woman shall want a child as replacement for the penis I never had.[1] Did you know that if you were to look up 'mothering' in Laplanche and Pontalis' "The Language of Psychoanalysis", you would find that mothering is a psychoanalytic technique?[2] Nowhere in this entry is there any mention of women who are mothers and if you want to find out anything about mothers you have to look up 'penis-envy'.…