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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In this book the bestselling author and psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati offers a fundamental re-examination of what 'being a mother' means today, in a world where new social and sexual freedoms mean that motherhood is no longer the sole destiny of women. Questioning the belief that a mother's love is natural and unconditional, he paints a more complex and troubling picture of the mother-child relationship, observing that mothers may even resent their children as a result of unresolved conflicts between different dimensions of love. The mother's hands not only nurture but can also potentially harm. Recalcati argues that it is precisely in these competing demands that motherhood fulfils its function: only if the mother is 'not-all-mother' can a child experience the absence that enables it to access the symbolic and cultural world. Recalcati cuts through conventional wisdom to offer a fresh perspective on the changing nature of motherhood today. An international bestseller, this book will appeal to a wide general readership, as well as to students and scholars of gender studies, psychoanalysis and related disciplines.
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Seitenzahl: 266
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
Introduction
Notes
1 The Mother’s Desire
The Hands
The Wait
The Face
Lalangue
The Breast
Absence
Desire
Paranoia
The Name
Care
Transcendence
Notes
2 The Mother’s Shadow
The Two Mothers and Solomon’s Ruling
Wanting to Have a Child
Maternal Anxiety
The Child as Object
The Mother’s Refusal
‘Primary Perversion’
The Mother’s Enjoyment
Ange Duroc
The Mother-as-Crocodile
The Narcissistic Mother
A Fugitive Mother
The Medea Complex
Mommy
Notes
3 The Mother’s Inheritance
Maternal Power
The Maternal Sentence
Maternal Inheritance
The Dead Mother
Mother and Daughter
Failure of Inheritance
Ravage
Violence and Resignation
The Mother’s Solitude
A Successful Inheritance
Notes
Epilogue
Being Fair To The Mother
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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For all the mothers to whom I have listened
The Mother’s Hands
Desire, Fantasy and the Inheritance of the Maternal
Massimo Recalcati
Translated by Alice Kilgarriff
polity
First published in Italian as Le mani della madre, copyright © Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano, 2013. Published under licence from Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milan, Italy.This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3170-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
You’re not more near to God than we.To Him all things are far.And yet your hands – how wondrouslyGrown full of grace they are.Such hands by woman never grewSo ripe, so fulsomely.I am the day, I am the dew:You are the tree.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Annunciation
Have you ever noticed how children are born without eyelashes? When they are feeding, face to face, insistent, exclusive, the mother waits day in day out, through the infinite passing of the hours, for the lashes on her child’s hitherto hairless eyes to grow. How much does an eyelash weigh? Perhaps as much as the breath emitted when saying a name. Was your Lacan thinking of this unit of weight when he spoke of the ‘particularized interest’ that motivates maternal care?
Roberta Abbondanza, from a personal letter
1The Mother’s Desire
The Hands
I have a distant yet persistent memory. At times I ask myself why it is still with me after all these years, why it has not entered, as is the case with so many others, that limbo of memory without memory that is a part of our daily lives.
I was nine years old. My mother and I were in our old house at Cernusco sul Naviglio on the eastern outskirts of Milan, situated at the back of the flower shop belonging to my father and his brothers. We were in the little dining room watching a film, on our black-and-white television, which was based on a real-life story: for hours on end a mother holds in her own hands the hands of her child who, playing on the terrace on the top floor of a large block of flats, had found himself clinging to the balcony railings for dear life. This is the memory that has stayed with me all these years: a mother holds in her own hands the hands of her child who is suspended over the void.
Writing this book pushed me to watch that film again, not least to reassure myself as to the reliability of my memory. Had I imagined it? Had I kept within me a non-existent memory, or, as psychoanalysis describes it, a ‘screen memory’? Our research reassures me: the film really does exist in the mysterious archives of the RAI (the Italian National Broadcaster), and is in fact called La madre di Torino [The Mother of Turin]; the director is Gianni Bongioanni; the year of production, 1968.
Watching it again I cannot help but notice the repositioning carried out by my memory. The scene takes place in Turin on Corso Peschiera, on the corner of Corso Francia, in a building in a residential area (why, in my memory, was it a building in a run-down council estate?); the mother was a beautiful, elegant woman (why had I remembered her as so old?). The plot is essentially as I remembered it: a child of four or five years old, so pre-school (why do I remember him walking uncertainly, as if he were younger than two?) who, whilst playing at shooting an aeroplane in the sky, falls into the void from the top floor of the great palazzo, ending up dangling miraculously from the bars of the railing. The mother, who notices his absence, immediately helps him, gripping him firmly in her hands.
Her attempts to attract the attention of passers-by are in vain. The noise of the cars and daily street life carrying on, indifferent, masks the mother’s screams, whilst time passes and the woman’s hands, now weakened by the prolonged effort, seem to have to let go those of her child.
The pair appear isolated from the rest of the world; one attached to the other, without hope (why do I remember the real desperation of the child and the mother, even though the acting is so flat, void of any authenticity, to the point that, watching it again, it appears almost farcical?). Then a barman casually looks up, his gaze meeting the child’s body swinging in the void, and alerts the passers-by and firemen. I had also correctly remembered the happy ending: mother and child are saved by the brave gesture of a worker from a nearby garage, who anticipates the firemen’s arrival and renders futile the local people’s awkward attempts to help. This is the moment (which I also recalled perfectly) in which the mother slowly collapses to the floor holding those hands in her hands, now rigid from the strain. How much time had passed? An entire day? How long had that mother held her son’s life in her hands? (Why in my memory was it a period of time that was unending?)
The initial question is still valid: what justified the obstinate permanence of such a recollection in my memory, along with all of its distortions? Did the (relative) proximity of my age to that of the child, along with his frivolousness, favour a projective identification? Did I perhaps feel like a child suspended over the void who would have liked to be taken by his mother’s hands? Did the mother–child pairing in the film intensify that of me and my mother as we watched the film? More radically, today I can see how, in that scene, the mother is a presence capable of alleviating anxiety, to extricate that life from the state of absolute abandonment into which it is launched.
Why have I never forgotten the mother of Turin? I try to answer that question by first thinking of how I have often felt as though I was suspended over the void just like that child, and how many times I have called from the loneliness of that void for the hands of those I loved to support me. Is this not perhaps the most radical condition of human life? Does life not come to life through the continual reaching out, holding on to and entrusting ourselves to the hands of the Other? Is mother perhaps the name that defines the hands of this first Other, which each of us has invoked in the silence of our own void? Is being born not always being taken by the hands of the Other? Is this not what led Freud to identify in the first face of the mother the figure of the ‘extraneous help’1 or ‘saviour’?
The mother of Turin was a news item destined to be forgotten along with so many others. What were that mother and son called? I cannot remember, not even now after having recently watched the film, but I doubt they even had names. They were just a mother and a son. It was just a nameless son holding on to the hands of a nameless mother. This is also the case with the father and the son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: they are also deprived of their own names. They are just hands that hold on to other hands, hands held tight in other hands and all around is the void, the nothing, the non-sense, the body of a child that swings over the abyss, the body of a child who wants to be protected from the cold, dark night.
That’s it, I tell myself today, that which never passes, that which proved itself to be truly unforgettable for me, that which persists in these images: the hands of the mother of Turin clutching those of her son hanging over the abyss. It is a metaphor for the Other, who responds to the scream of life, refusing to let it fall into insignificance, instead offering the support without which it would plunge into the void. This is what the mother of Turin has impressed indelibly upon me and that I can see once more: the silent resistance, the offering of one’s own bare hands, the obstinate refusal to leave life alone and without hope, the gift of a presence that does not disappear. This is the ‘plant’ of the mother that captures, in Rilke’s words, the ‘dew’ and the coming of the day.
Are the hands not the first face of the mother? Have they not been the hands of my mother, which caressed my body, sowing letters, memories, signs, ploughing it as if it were earth? How important can a mother’s hands be to a child? This is another reason that image of motherhood has never left me, has proved indelible.
In the Freudian description of the maternal Other as the first ‘saviour’ at that traumatic onset of life we can find an initial definition of the mother as ‘the closest’ Other, who knows how to respond to the call of life that is screaming out. If, as Freud and Lacan believed, human life comes to life in a condition of ‘prematuration’, ‘lack of preparation’, ‘fragmentation’, ‘defencelessness’, ‘absolute abandon’, in a condition of inadequacy, vulnerability, of being exposed to the non-sense of the real, the hands of the Other (the presence of the Other) are required before all else to safeguard that life, protect it, remove it from any danger of falling.
The hands of the mother of Turin are not hands that punish, castigate or humiliate; they are not hands of anger or violence; they are not hands that hit and that we can recognize in our childhood scars. They are bare hands, hands that are offered to other hands, hands that sustain the life hanging over the bottomless abyss. Life, human life, needs to find these hands, the bare hands of the mother, the hands that save it from the precipice of non-sense. Was this not what my childish gaze, sitting next to my mother, wished to project onto the black-and-white television screen? For me, this remains the first face of motherhood, destined to withstand the ravages of time and all the transformations of the family that are currently taking place.
If motherhood no longer coincides with the ability to generate life or the emotional experience of gestation but, thanks to the powers of science, has been extended to other possible forms that do not require coitus or the real of sex, the hands belonging to the mother of Turin remind us of an essential function of motherhood that no historic change will ever cancel out: the mother is the name of the Other who does not let life fall into the void, who holds life in their own hands, stopping it from falling; it is the name of the first ‘saviour’.
This is a nodal point in this book: that which I refer to here as ‘mother’ does not necessarily correspond to the real mother understood as the biological female parent of the child. Freud already considered ‘mother’ the name of the first figure of the Other that takes care of a human life which it recognizes as its own creation. This means that ‘mother’, like ‘father’, is a figure that transcends sex, blood, ancestry and biology.2 ‘Mother’ is the name of the Other who holds out their bare hands to the life that comes into the world, to the life that, upon entering the world, begs for meaning.
The Wait
Motherhood is a great figure of waiting. Here is another lesson that we can take from the mother of Turin: waiting, not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by time, resisting, not being consumed by impatience.
If you listen to mothers (as a psychoanalyst often does), waiting occupies a central place in their discourse, particularly during pregnancy. Is it not a special wait, that of waiting for the child to grow and be brought into the world? But a mother’s wait is unlike any other. She is not waiting for something: a train or an anniversary, a concert or a contract. Motherhood is a radical experience of waiting because the person waiting has no control over what she is waiting for. The unknown runs through every real wait: we never know what or who we are waiting for, we never know what it will be like at the end. The wait upsets what is already known, what has already been learned, what has already been seen, suspending our ideal of mastery. A quota of uncertainty always cuts through the wait for the Other even when we believe we know it well: will it be the Other I know, that I think I know, that I have learned to recognize?
The mother’s is not a simple wait for an event that might happen in the world, but for something that, though she is carrying it with her, inside her, in her own belly, in her own womb, appears as a principle of otherness that makes an other world possible. The wait is an incredibly profound element of motherhood because it reveals that the child comes into the world as a boundless transcendence, one that is impossible to anticipate and destined to change the face of the world.
It also happens in love, when we wait, when we continue to wait for someone we miss, someone we love, despite knowing their body and their name so very well. Always in love, the person we love preserves a level of otherness that is impossible to overcome, and that coincides with their most intimate freedom. With love, as with motherhood, we experience an immanence and a transcendence that are bound together. This is the reason waiting constitutes the very backbone of amorous discourse. ‘Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move’, wrote Roland Barthes. ‘The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.’3 But in pregnancy, the wait, the one being waited for, the one who will come to us, who is coming into the world, is not yet truly of this world. Its body (the body of the child) remains outside of this world during pregnancy despite being contained within that of the mother.
This is a paradox of motherhood: during the wait of pregnancy, the child can only be in the world through the mother; it is not yet in the world as a subject. The mother waits for the person she already carries with her, without knowing who they are or what they are like, without having ever seen them before.
The mother’s wait is without precedent, one that cannot even be alleviated by the machines of science: the meeting with a child is the meeting with an absolute that is not comparable, that cannot be confused with anyone else; an unrepeatable experience that finds no analogy with itself in the world. It is transcendence, new life, life that comes into the world as irreplaceable, inimitable, a singular combination of necessity and freedom, unrepeatable, always and radically life of an ‘only child’.4
The mother lives this wait, the patience of waiting, safeguarding the child that remains a mystery to her. This internal division does not affect the father, who can only observe from the outside, an external witness to that which is taking place in the woman’s body, located elsewhere. Only the mother can experience an absolute foreign proximity, a transcendence and immanence that are absolute. The life that she hosts (even from before its conception) in fantasies and dreams is another life, a different life, a life that, though it comes from her flesh and blood, seems made of another flesh and another blood.
The mother’s wait eludes, as a matter of principle, a purely biological explanation of life. Motherhood is not a fact of nature, but of its upheaval. It is insisted upon in various ways by both psychoanalysis and the teachings of the Bible. It is no coincidence that the matriarchs described in the Old Testament – Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel – are, at least from the restricted viewpoint of nature, sterile mothers. The lesson on motherhood that we can glean from the matriarchs is that motherhood is not only an event that affects the body, but a ‘movement towards’ something, an opening. Being a mother does not mean cultivating one’s ‘self’, but opening up to the Other. In biblical texts, motherhood is in no way an experience determined by the laws of nature, but instead represents their fracture, their fragmentation, their subversion. Bringing a child into the world never occurs as a natural event. Sterility can only be overcome
