Andre Green: Searching for the Origins of Depression. Or about the "dead mother complex" October 13th, 2012

Originally posted by ameli39 at Andre Green: Finding the Origins of Depression. Or about the "dead mother complex"

One of the rather complex cases of depressive personality disorder is the situation when the patient's persistent depression is based on the so-called "dead mother complex". This complex was discovered by the French psychoanalyst Andre Green. You can read the original article by Andre Green (in a good, adapted presentation) here http://ameli39.livejournal.com/590974.html#cutid1
And in this post, I want to give an explanation of Green's concept, in which you can find answers to the following questions:
1. What happened to the mother?
2 What happens to the child of such a mother?
3. What happens to such a person during adult life?

The concept of the “dead mother” of the French psychoanalyst Andre Green is based on a simple postulate: A child's early relationship with his mother has a significant impact on his later mental well-being. And if these relationships are devoid of emotional responsiveness, warmth, closeness, then this can lead to the fact that in the psyche of the baby the image of the mother imprinted as cold and “dead,” despite the fact that the mother is, in fact, alive. Hence the name of the concept: “deadness” means mother's inner state, her mental rather than physical death.
A. Green noted that in the history of his patients suffering from severe depression, emotional alienation in relations with their mother was quite often observed literally from the very first days of life. The mothers of such patients were unable to fully perform their functions in relation to the child.
1. What happened to the mother?

Such mothers, due to various circumstances (as a rule, this is associated with the loss of significant relationships or deep disappointment in life: the death of loved ones, a previous miscarriage, a betrayal of a husband, etc.) are deeply immersed in their own depression and their own grief. Being unable to cope with them on their own, they become isolated in their painful experiences, because of which they cannot be responsive to the needs of the child, lose interest in him. At the same time, the mother can continue to mechanically take care and perform her functions (feed, wash, dress), but she is not capable of genuine relationships, just as she is not capable of true grief over her depression. Such mothers “do not see” their children: they can literally avoid eye and tactile contact with the child, “not hear” when the child cries, etc. Their own grief is so strong that it dominates the rest of life.
2. What is happening at this moment with the child?
The loss of proper attention, care and love from the mother is experienced by the child as a catastrophe! Such behavior of the mother, albeit forced, leads to serious changes in the psyche of the child: in an attempt to somehow save the mother (after all, he needs her so much!), the child identifies with her, and he himself becomes internally cold, numb, “dead” . Those. the need for a mother, when she cannot be satisfied directly in real life, is illusoryly satisfied by the child through the fact that he, as it were, tries to become this mother for himself. But the only mother he sees is distant, unresponsive, emotionally cold. This is how the child himself becomes for many years to come. At the same time, he acquires the skill not to feel anything, fearing that his anger (arising as a normal reaction to ignoring his mother) can destroy an already “dead” object. This pattern of "indifference" is fixed and will be reproduced in any relationship that threatens disappointment - i.e. in any intimate relationship. Instead of experiencing love and affection, a person with such an attitude, out of fear of losing a relationship and being “abandoned” again, will devalue their significance and the person with whom this relationship is established.
The second important point is the fact that the cause of maternal depression remains hidden from the child. He does not understand why the closest person suddenly deprives him of love and warmth, the true meaning of the mother's behavior is not available. The process of searching for the lost meaning often leads to increased development of the intellect and fantasizing. The child once had an experience of rejection by a mother whose mood depended on reasons unknown to him. Now he will direct all his strength to predict the behavior, feelings, moods and thoughts of the people around him.
But none of the above, none of the defense mechanisms, whether it be “indifference” or fantasizing and intellectualization, are capable of healing the deep wound that a person has left. This wound blocks the ability to give and receive love, because in this area there is such a strong emotional pain that any attempt at close relationships leads to increased fears, disappointments, helplessness, despair. The long-established connection (identification) with the “dead mother”, remaining hidden from consciousness, leaves a gaping hole in the soul, into which all attempts to love fail.
3. What happens to such a person in adulthood?
Patients themselves are not aware of their own grief in the same way that their “dead” mothers were not aware of it. After all, since in fact the mothers of such patients remain alive, the true cause of their depression (identification with "deadness") is deeply hidden in the unconscious layer of the psyche. Thus, grief remains unprocessed, unnamed, unexperienced. Therefore, the requests with which such patients come to therapy rarely concern depressive experiences. Often they hide behind complaints about problems in personal and / or work relationships, a feeling of spiritual emptiness, low self-esteem, etc.
In such people, there is often a dissociation between the soul and the body and a blockade of love. Those. in a relationship, they may seek exclusively isolated satisfaction of a sexual need or only platonic tenderness. It is impossible to combine these needs together, because it threatens to make a person vulnerable, dependent.
Such people believe that they are able to give love, that they have large reserves of this love, but in fact, all feelings remained, as it were, “mortgaged by a dead mother.” Those. the person himself does not have this love, he gave all of it to his mother, who “died”, but remained unburied.
Therapy with such patients is quite difficult. Because of early negative experiences, they find it difficult to establish relationships with other people, including with a psychotherapist, and having established, they project the image of their depressed mother onto him. They do not believe that a therapist can help them. Unconsciously, they expect rejection from him.
But a deep study of the patient’s personal history and experience, together with the “live”, empathic desire of the therapist and his sincere interest (as opposed to the indifference of the “dead mother”) in helping, allow you to get to the bottom of the true causes of the patient’s condition, make them conscious, allow them to live feelings that have remained blocked, and finally make room for a new relationship."
original
http://psy-aletheia.ru/blog/la-mere-morte

Andre Green's work was inspired by the work of Hery Ey, who worked there from 1925 to 1965. In 1956 he began a four-year analysis with Maurice Bouvet. After Bouvet's death, he did analysis with Jean Mallet and then with Catherine Parat. He participated in Lacan's seminars for seven years.

6. The concept of "white psychosis" is translated on the site psihoanalitiki.kiev.ua.

Biography of Andre Green

Andre Green was born in 1927 in Egypt. In 1946, already fascinated by psychiatry, he went to Paris to study medicine, completing his psychiatry examinations in 1953. He established links with St. Anne's Hospital, a unique center of the time for interdisciplinary meetings between psychiatrists, psychologists and anthropologists.

In 1965, after completing a training analysis, Green became a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), of which he was president from 1986 to 1989. From 1975 to 1977 he was Vice President of the International Psychoanalytic Association and from 1979 to 1980 Freud Memorial Professor at University College London. He was elected an honorary member of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

Two main themes permeate Greene's writings: the relevance of fatherhood, stemming from the work of Lacan, and the other, the preoccupation with the relationship with the mother, formed from Green's personal experience and the work of Winnicott and Bion.

During his lifetime, Greene engaged in masterful and scholarly dialogue with philosophers, scientists, and anthropologists. There are numerous thoughts in this work, such as the connection between the pleasure of life and the return of the repressed, or the phenomenon of retroactive reverberation (anticipatory alert) in analytic listening. The main themes of his work are focused on the theory of affect, the theory of representation and language, the work of the negative (with its constellation of concepts such as "dead mother", "death narcissism", "white psychosis" and "negative hallucination"), narcissism and borderline states, objectification function, riangulation and metapsychological theory of temporality. In addition, he wrote a number of works on applied psychoanalysis. According to Greene, the goal of the psychoanalytic process is not so much awareness as awareness of the unconscious.

Green stated in 1975: "The analytic object is neither internal (of the analysant or analyst) nor external (of either), but it is in between." In a session, the analytic object is like a third object, the product of the encounter between the analysand and the analyst.

Green suggests that in some schools of thought where analysis is limited to transference interpretation, there is a limited analytic task that undermines the freedom and spontaneity of discourse and represents a return to suggestion. He believed that all interpretations take place in the context of transfer (le cadre du transfert), even if they do not refer to it. Moreover, all material in any analysis contains elements related to different temporal dimensions.

In the analytic process, the analyst encounters the patient's fundamental experience of distress (hilflosigkeit). The analyst's countertransference is susceptible to the traces left by these infantile experiences. By inviting the patient to abandon the mechanisms of control, the analytic situation can revive the traumatic situation.

André Green was one of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers of our time and created his own theory of psychoanalysis. This theory includes Freudian metapsychology, but pushes psychoanalytic thinking even further towards the theory of psychotic configurations and the theory of what has not reached representation or is not represented. Thinking is related to absence and also to sexuality. André Green's psychoanalytic framework can be seen as a theory of gradients (parts), where the general theory is more important than any of its parts. Any of the terms can represent a whole, but that's all there is to it.

Rosine Perelberg 2015, translated and edited by SlobodyanyukE. BUT.

Works by Andre Green in English:

Green, A. (1975). Orestes and Oedipus. Int. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 2:355-364.

Green, A. (1986). The Dead Mother. In On Private Madness. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, pp. 142-173.

Green, A. (1997). The Intuition of the Negative in Playing And Reality. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 78:1071-1084.

Green, A. (1998b). The Primordial Mind and the Work of the Negative. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 79:649-665.

Green, A. (2000). The Central Phobic Position. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 81:429-451.

Green, A. (2004). Thirdness and Psychoanalytic Concepts. psychoanal. Q. 73:99-135.

Books:

Green, A. (1986). On Private Madness. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Green, A. (1999a) The Work of the Negative. London: Free Association Books.

Green, A. (1999b). The Fabric of Affect in Psychoanalytic Discourse. London: Routledge and The New Library of Psychoanalysis.

Green, A. (2001). Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism. . London: Free Association Books.

Green, A. (2002). Time in Psychoanalysis. London: Free Associations Books.

Green, A. (2002). Ideas Directrices pour une Psychanalyse Contemporaine. Paris: P.U.F.

Green, A. (2011). Illusions and Disillusions of Psychoanalytic Work. London: Karnac.

Green, A. (2011). The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Green, A. and Kohon, G. (2005). Love and its Vicissitudes. London: Routledge.

André Green - psychologist, psychoanalyst, full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, was vice president of the IPA, president of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, director of the Paris Institute of Psychoanalysis, held the Freud Chair at the London University.

dead mother complex

In square brackets everywhere - the text added by scientific editor P. V. Kachalov.

The dead mother complex is a revelation of transference. The main complaints and symptoms with which the subject first presents to the analyst are not of a depressive nature. This symptomatology for the most part comes down to failures in affective, love and professional life, complicated by more or less acute conflicts with the closest environment. It often happens that, by spontaneously telling the story of his personal life, the patient involuntarily makes the analyst think about the depression that should or could have occurred there and at that time in [the patient's] childhood, [about that depression] that the subject himself does not attribute values. This depression [only] occasionally, having sporadically reached clinical levels [in the past], will become apparent only in the transference. As for the present symptoms of the classical neuroses, they are of secondary importance, or even if they are expressed, the analyst gets the feeling that an analysis of their genesis will not provide a clue to the conflict. On the contrary, the narcissistic problem comes to the fore, within the framework of which the requirements of the Ideal I are exorbitant, in synergy or in opposition to the Super-I. There is a feeling of powerlessness.

Powerlessness to get out of a conflict situation, powerlessness to love, use your talents, multiply your achievements, or, if any, deep dissatisfaction with their results.

When the analysis begins, the transference sometimes opens quite soon, but more often after long years of analysis, a unique depression of its kind. The analyst has a sense of inconsistency between transference depression(a term I propose for this case to contrast it with transference neurosis) and external behavior, which depression does not affect, since there is nothing to indicate that it has become obvious to the [patient's] environment, which, however, does not prevent him from loved ones suffer from those object relations that the analysand imposes on them.

This transference depression does not point to anything other than a recurrence of infantile depression, the characteristics of which I find it useful to clarify.

Here we are not talking about depression from the real loss of the object, [that is], I want to say that it is not about the problem of real separation from the object that has left the subject. Such a fact may be present, but it is not the basis of the dead mother complex.

The main feature of this depression is that it develops in the presence ofan object immersed in its grief. The mother, for one reason or another, became depressed. The variety of etiological factors here is very large. Of course, among the main causes of such maternal depression we find the loss of a beloved object: a child, a relative, a close friend, or any other object strongly invested by the mother. But it can also be a depression of disappointment that inflicts a narcissistic wound: the vicissitudes of fate in one's own family or in the family of parents; the love affair of a father leaving his mother; humiliation, etc.

In any case, the sadness of the mother and the decrease in her interest in the child are in the foreground.

It is important to emphasize that, as [already] understood by all authors, the most severe case is the death of [another] child at an early age. I especially strongly want to point out such a cause [of maternal depression], which completely eludes the child, because [at the beginning] he does not have enough data by which he could know about it [this reason], [and to that extent] its retrospective recognition [remains] forever impossible, because it [this reason] is kept secret, [namely] - a miscarriage in the mother, which in the analysis has to be reconstructed according to the smallest signs. [This] hypothetical, of course, construction [about a miscarriage only and] gives coherence to [various] manifestations of [analytical] material attributed by the subject [himself] to the subsequent history [of his life].

Then there is a sharp, indeed mutational, change in the maternal imago. The presence of a genuine liveliness in the subject, suddenly stopped [in development], learning to cling and frozen in [this] stupor, indicates that until some time [he] had a happy and [affectively] rich relationship with his mother. The child felt loved, despite all the unforeseen accidents that even the most ideal relationship does not exclude. From the photographs in the family album, a cheerful, cheerful, inquisitive baby, full of [unrevealed] abilities, looks [at us], while later photos testify to the loss of this primary happiness. Everything will be finished, as with disappeared civilizations, the cause of the death of which historians are vainly looking for, putting forward a hypothesis about a seismic shock that destroyed the palace, temple, buildings and dwellings, from which nothing remained but ruins. Here, however, the catastrophe is limited to the [formation] of a cold core, which [although] will be bypassed in further [development], but leaves an indelible mark on the erotic investments of the subjects in question.

The transformation of the mental life of the child at the moment of abrupt disinvestment by his mother in [her] sudden grief is experienced by him as a catastrophe. Nothing foretold that love would be lost so suddenly. It doesn't take long to explain what kind of narcissistic trauma such a change represents. It should, however, be emphasized that it [trauma] consists in premature disappointment and entails, in addition to the loss of love, the loss of meaning, since the infant does not find any explanation that allows him to understand what happened. It is clear that if he [the child] experiences himself as the center of the mother's universe, then, of course, he will interpret this disappointment as a consequence of his attraction to the object. It is especially unfavorable if the dead mother complex develops at the moment the child discovers the existence of a third, the father, and if the new investment is interpreted by him as the cause of maternal disinvestment. Be that as it may, the triangulation in these cases develops prematurely and unsuccessfully. For either, as I have just said, the diminution of maternal love is attributed to the father's mother's investment, or this diminution [of her love] will provoke a particularly intense and premature investment of the father as a savior from the conflict between child and mother. In reality, however, the father most often does not respond to the helplessness of the child. This is how the subject

[is] sandwiched between: the mother is dead, and the father is inaccessible, whether it is the father who is most concerned about the state of the mother, but does not come to the aid of the child, or whether it is the father who leaves both, and mother and child, to get out of this situation.

After the child has made vain attempts to reparate the mother, absorbed in her grief and making him feel the full extent of his impotence, after he has experienced both the loss of maternal love and the threat of losing the mother herself, and has struggled with anxiety by various active means, such as agitation, demon -drowsy or night terrors, I will apply a series of defenses of a different kind.

The first and most important [protection] will be the [spiritual] movement, one in two persons: disinvestment of the mother object and unconscious identificationwith dead mother. Mainly affective, this disinvestment [concerns] also [mental] representations and is a psychic murder of the object, committed without hatred. It is clear that maternal grief forbids any occurrence and a [small] share of hatred that can cause even greater damage to her image. This operation of disinvestment of the mother image does not result in any destructive drives, [but] as a result, a hole is formed in the fabric of the object relationship with the mother; [all] this does not interfere with [the child's] maintenance of [the mother's] peripheral investments; just as the mother continues to love him and continues to deal with him, [even] feeling powerless to love [him] in [her] grief, which has so changed her basic attitude towards the child. [But] all the same, as they say, "the heart does not lie with him." The other side of disinvestment is the primary identification with the object. Mirror identification becomes almost obligate after complementarity reactions (artificial gaiety, agitation, etc.) have failed. Reactionary symmetry - in the form of [showing] sympathy [for her reactions] - turns out to be [here] the only possible means of restoring closeness with the mother. But the real goal of [such] mimeticism is not in the true reparation [of the parent object], but in preserving the [already] impossible possession of the object, to have it, becoming not the same as it [the object], but itself. Identification - the condition of both the rejection of the object, and at the same time its preservation according to the cannibal type - is obviously unconscious. Such identification [together with disinvestment] occurs without the knowledge of the I-subject and against his will; this [is] the difference from other, further [just] unconsciously occurring, disinvestments, since these other cases involve getting rid of the [subject] from the object, [at the same time] the withdrawal of [object investments] turns in favor of the [subject ]. Hence its [identification] alienating character. In further object relations, the subject, having become a victim of repetition obsession, will, repeating the previous defense, actively disinvest [any] object that risks disappointing [him, the subject], but what remains completely unconscious for him is [his] identification with the dead mother, with which from now on he will be united in the disinvestment of traces of trauma.

The second fact is, as I have [already] stressed, loss of meaning. The “construction” of the breast, for which pleasure is both the cause, the goal, and the guarantor, collapsed all at once and for no reason. Even imagining the reversal of the situation by the subject who, in negative megalomania, ascribes to himself the responsibility for the change, there remains an impassable gulf between the offense for which the subject could reproach himself and the intensity of the mother's reaction. The most he can think of is that, rather than with any forbidden desire, this offense is connected with his [subject's] way of being; Indeed, henceforth he is forbidden to be. Due to the vulnerability of the maternal image, the external expression of destructive aggressiveness is impossible; such a state of [things], which [otherwise] would push the child to let himself die, forces him to find someone responsible for the mother's gloomy mood, be it [even] a scapegoat. This role is assigned to the father. In any case, I repeat, there is a premature triangulation in which the child, the mother, and the unknown object of maternal grief are present. The unknown object of grief and the father then condense, forming in the child an early Oedipus complex.

This whole situation, associated with the loss of meaning, entails the opening of a second front of defenses.

The development of secondary hatred, which is neither primary nor fundamental; [secondary hatred] manifested in the desires of regressive incorporation, and at the same time - from anal positions colored by manic sadism, where it is a question of dominating the object, defiling it, taking revenge on it, etc.

Autoerotic arousal consists in seeking pure sensual pleasure, almost organ pleasure, without tenderness, without pity, not necessarily accompanied by sadistic fantasies, but remaining [forever] marked by restraint in [one's] love of the object. This [restraint] will serve as the basis for future hysterical identifications. There is a premature dissociation between body and soul, between sensuality and tenderness, and a blockade of love. An object is sought for by its ability to trigger the isolated enjoyment of one or more erogenous zones, without merging into mutual enjoyment of two more or less integral objects.

Finally, and most importantly, the search for the lost meaning structures the premature development of the phantasmatic and intellectual abilities of the ego. The development of frenzied play activity takes place not in the freedom to play, but in at-the need to imagine just as intellectual development fits into at-the need to think. Performance and self-healing go hand in hand towards the same goal: by overcoming the turmoil of breast loss and maintaining this ability to create chest-carrier, a patch of cognitive tissue designed to mask a disinvestment hole, while secondary hatred and erotic arousal seethe at the abyss at the edge. Such overinvested intellectual activity necessarily carries with it a significant amount of projection. Contrary to popular belief, projection does not always [imply] a false judgment. Projection is determined not by the truth or falsity of what is being projected, but by the operation of transferring to the external scene (even the scene of the object) an investigation and even a guess about what must be rejected and destroyed inside. The child has had the brutal experience of being dependent on the mother's mood swings. From now on, he will devote his efforts to divination or anticipation.

The compromised unity of the Self, henceforth full of holes, is realized either on the plane of fantasy, opening the way for artistic creativity, or on the plane of cognition, [serving] as a source of intellectual wealth. It is clear that we are dealing with attempts to cope with a traumatic situation. But this coping is doomed to failure. Not that it failed where it took the theater [of war] action. [Although] such premature idealized sublimations come from immature and undoubtedly [too] hasty psychic formations, I see no reason, short of falling into a normative ideology, to dispute their authenticity [as sublimations]. Their failure lies elsewhere. These sublimations will reveal their inability to play a balancing role in the psychic economy, since at one point the subject remains especially vulnerable - in regard to his love life. In this area, [any] wound will wake up [such | mental pain that we will [only] observe the rebirth of the dead mother, who, returning to the forefront during the crisis, will destroy all the sublimation achievements of the subject, which, however, are not lost [permanently], but [only] temporarily blocked. Either love will [suddenly] again revive the development of sublimated achievements, then [themselves] these last [sublimations] will try to unblock love. For a moment they [love and sublimation] can unite their efforts, but soon destructiveness will exceed the capabilities of the subject, who [the subject] does not have the necessary investments, [neither] to maintain a long-term object relationship, [nor] to gradually build up a deep personal involvement that requires concern for the other. So [every] attempt [to fall in love] turns into [only] inevitable disappointment either in the object or in the [own] Self, returning [the subject] to the familiar feeling of failure and powerlessness. The patient has a feeling that a curse is hanging over him, the curse of the dead mother, who will never die and is holding him captive. Pain, that narcissistic feeling, comes out. It [pain] is the suffering constantly inflicted by the edges of the [narcissistic] wound, coloring non-investment, holding back manifestations of [and] hatred, [and] erotic arousal, and breast loss. In psychic pain it is [just as] impossible to hate as [and] love, it is impossible to enjoy, even masochistically, it is impossible to think, There is only a feeling of bondage that takes the I from itself and alienates it [I] in an unimaginable image [of a dead mother ].

The route of the subject resembles the pursuit of a non-introjected object, without the possibility of abandoning it or losing it, all the more, without the possibility of accepting its introjection into the Self invested by the dead mother. In general, the objects of a [given] subject always remain on the verge of the Self - and not quite inside, and not quite outside. And it is no coincidence, because the place - in the center - is occupied by a dead mother.

For a long time, the analysis of these subjects was carried out through the study of classical conflicts: the Oedipus complex, pregenital fixations, anal and oral. Repression involving infantile sexuality [or] aggressiveness has been relentlessly interpreted. Progress has certainly been made. But for the analyst, this [progress] was not very convincing, even if the analysand, for his part, tried to console himself by emphasizing those aspects with which he could be pleased.

In fact, all this psychoanalytic work remains an occasion for a spectacular collapse, where everything [suddenly] appears as on the first day, to the point that [one day] the analysand states that he can no longer continue to deceive himself, and feels compelled to declare the inconsistency [namely] of the object, transference-analyst, despite [all] the twists of relations with the objects of lateral transferences, which [also] helped him avoid touching the central core of the conflict.

During these courses of treatment, I finally realized that I had remained deaf to some [feature] of the speech of my analysands, the [meaning] of which they left me to guess. Behind the eternal complaints about the mother's wickedness, her incomprehension or severity, the protective meaning of these conversations, [namely], from strong homosexuality, was clearly guessed. Female homosexuality in both sexes, since the boy expresses the female part of his personality in this way, often in search of paternal compensation. But I kept asking myself why this situation dragged on. My deafness concerned the fact that behind the complaintspa "the actions of the mother, [behind] her actions, loomed the shadow of her absence. Indeed, the complaint against [unknown] X was directed at the mother, absorbed either in herself or in something else, inaccessible, unresponsive, but always sad. A mute mother, even if [at the same time] talkative. When she was present, she remained indifferent, even when she tormented the child with her reproaches. [And] then the situation presented itself to me quite differently.

The dead mother took [with her] into the disinvestment of which she was the object of the love essence in which she had been invested before her grief: her gaze, her tone of voice, her smell, the memory of her caress. The loss of physical contact entailed the displacement of the memory trace of her touch. She was buried alive, but her grave itself was gone. The hole that gaped in its place made one fear loneliness, as if the subject was in danger of falling into it with the giblets. In this regard, I now believe that holding which Winnicott speaks of does not explain the sensation of dizzying fall that some of our patients experience; this [feeling] seems to be much more connected with that experience of mental deficiency, which is to the soul what fainting is to the physical body.

Along with the encapsulation of the object and the erasure of its trace by disinvestment, there is a primary identification with the dead mother and the transformation of positive identification into a negative one, that is, identification not with the object, but with the hole left [after itself] by disinvestment. And as soon as, from time to time, a new object is chosen to fill this emptiness, it [emptiness] [immediately] is filled with a suddenly manifesting affective hallucination of a dead mother.

All observable [data] is organized around this nucleus for a threefold purpose:

1) keeping the ego alive: hatred of the object, search for an exciting
pleasure, the search for meaning;

2) the resurrection of a dead mother: to interest her, entertain, return her taste
to life, make her laugh and smile;

3) rivalry with the object of grief in premature triangulation.

This type of patient poses serious technical problems, which I will not go into here. I refer on this subject to my work on the silence of the analyst.

I am afraid that the rule of silence in these cases only delays the transfer of the mother's white grief. I would add that the Kleinian technique of systematically interpreting destructiveness is unlikely to be of much use here. On the other hand, Winnicott's position, as formulated in the article "Using the Object", seems to me [more] adequate. But I am afraid that Winnicott did not sufficiently appreciate the importance of sexual fantasies, especially the initial scenes, which will be discussed below.

Olga Sinevich, psychologist, Gestalt therapist: The phenomenon of the "dead mother" was isolated, named and studied by the famous French psychoanalyst Andre Green. André Green's article was originally presented as a paper to the Paris Psychoanalytic Society on May 20, 1980.

I want to note that the dead mother complex does not arise because of the real loss of the mother, the dead mother is the mother who remains alive, but she is mentally dead, because for one reason or another she fell into depression (death of a child, relative, close friend or any other object strongly loved by the mother). Or is it the so-called depression of disappointment: these can be events that occur in one's own family or in the family of parents (husband's betrayal, divorce, humiliation, etc.).

In his report, A. Green considers the concept of the "dead mother" complex, its role and influence in the formation and development of the child's personality. A. Green also says that depressive symptoms are not typical for such clients, "there is a feeling of powerlessness: powerlessness to get out of a conflict situation, powerlessness to love, use one's talents, increase one's achievements, or, if any, deep dissatisfaction with their results ".

My first awareness of a dead mother first came to me in therapy long before reading Andre Green. I still remember this storm of grief, bitterness, heartbreaking pain, and soul-filled suffering, as well as a feeling of universal injustice. Then I went further and found out that more painful and destructive than a dead mother, maybe a dead mother who kills (that's what I called her). And I would like to tell you about a dead mother who kills. In my opinion, a dead mother who kills causes more damage to the child than just a dead mother.

Dead killing mothers are not only mothers who have shown cruelty towards their child, emotional rejection, neglect, humiliated their children in all known ways. But, these are also mothers, whose outward manifestations give the impression of care and love for their child, but this so-called care and love is manifested in a conniving and dominant hyper-protection, increased moral responsibility. I call such mothers sirens, they are very alluring, they just attract, beckon, call, and then "devour". In fact, a harsh, cruel, and rejecting mother can do less harm than an overprotective, chronically anxious mother. Because an abusive mother does not disguise her aggressive and killing tendencies as caring and loving.

In addition, dead mothers who kill are also mothers who are very concerned about the health of their child. Such mothers are interested in the child's illnesses, his failures (they are very sympathetic if something bad happens to the child, there is a lot of care and energy in this), and they all the time make gloomy predictions about the future of their child. They all the time, as it were, worry about their child, so that something does not happen to him. So that God forbid, I don’t get sick, I don’t fall down a hill, I don’t get hit by a car. “My daughter is growing up, as I am afraid that she will suddenly be raped.” "Oh, how I'm afraid for my child, I'm scared all the time, I'm afraid that something bad will happen to him."

Such a mother remains indifferent to favorable changes and does not react to the joy of the child, or even experiences some kind of discontent. The children of such mothers in adulthood say that they feel genuine interest and care from the mother if something happened to them, and when everything is fine, then there is a feeling that the mother is not very happy, and even upset that nothing nothing bad happened. In the dreams of such mothers there are many diseases, death, blood, corpses. In behavior, it does not cause visible damage to the child, but gradually and methodically suppresses in him the joy of life and faith in himself, in development, in life, and in the end infects him with his lethality, the child begins to fear life and reaches for death.

Thus, the essence of a dead mother who kills is not so much in her behavior, but in her subconscious attitude towards the child, which can manifest itself both in destructive behavior and in the form of care.

For me there is no doubt that there is an exchange of information between the mother and the baby. I suggest that the exchange occurs through fusion, internalization and identification by the child of the mother.

Spiegel says that "the infant is able to empathize with the mother's feelings long before his development allows him to understand their meaning, and this experience has a serious impact on him. Any disruption of communication causes anxiety and even panic." He says that by the age of five months, the baby shows symptoms of fear directed at the mother.

From my maternal experience, I can say that this happens much earlier, as early as a month the child can show these symptoms. In addition, already at the age of one week, the child feels the anxiety of his mother and reacts to her with strong crying, for example, when the mother takes a calm child in her arms or simply bends down and looks at him.

He further suggests that "perhaps the child receives from his mother impulses of unconscious hostility, nervous tension, due to empathic perception, becomes overwhelmed by her emotions of depression, anxiety and anger."

Here I can add that it is not possible to receive, but definitely receives. In addition, the mother's depression, her anxiety and anger, may be recognized by the mother herself, but the child still receives them. The mother's awareness of her destructiveness does not save the child from the empathic perception of her lethality. But thanks to this awareness, the child may not be subjected to the mother's unconscious aggressive impulses, in the form of "accidental" misunderstandings, such as: fell off the crib or changing table, accidentally hit or knocked on something (didn't want to at all) or “oh, something like that twisted and fell out of his hands.

So, the baby completely accepts, absorbs the image of the mother, including her hostility and destructiveness. This deadly impulse is integrated into the structure of the child's personality, his growing ego. The child copes with these impulses with the help of suppression. Suppression, as a response to the destructiveness of the mother and protection from her. In the behavior of children who have had a murderous mother, one can see masochistic behavior that persists throughout their lives.

Bromberg says "that masochism is encouraged by mothers in whose soul the child is identified with the hostile parent. These mothers are characterized by a high level of narcissism, a strong mismatch between their ideal ego and behavior, and a poorly developed sense of guilt. They present themselves as sacrificial they are caring and kind, but under their claims lies a hostile attitude.They promote and impose the suppression of sexual impulses, but behave sexually provocatively towards the child.

Even if they discover some kind of vice in themselves, they do not have a real sense of guilt, but a fear of what others might think. The child experiences their desire to control him. Since rejecting and hostile attitudes are evident, the child begins to feel that he lives in a hostile world. The aspiration of his instincts is intensely stimulated, but their expression is forbidden. He is forced to exercise control over his impulses long before he acquires the ability to do so. Inevitable failure leads to punishment and loss of self-esteem. Ego development is hampered and the ego tends to remain weak, fearful and submissive. The child comes to the conclusion that the most acceptable behavior for him will be the one that ends in failure and suffering. So suffering because of his mother is associated with the concept of love, the child eventually begins to perceive it as love. "But even this mother is less traumatic than the next.

There is a type of mothers who kill, which include not only the characteristics described above, i.e. self-sacrificing, kind and caring, "caring for chastity", but at the same time, destructive killing impulses erupt in them in the form of unpredictable outbursts of anger and rage, and cruelty towards their child. Then these outbursts and abuse are "served" as deep care and love. "I did this to you because I love you very much and care about you, I was very scared or worried about you." In my practice there were children of such mothers. These are deeply suffering people, they practically do not enjoy life. Their inner world is filled with the strongest suffering, they feel their worthlessness, they feel contemptible, worse than anyone. It is very difficult for them to find something good in themselves. Killing themselves with toxic shame. Inside themselves, they often describe some kind of devouring, killing hole, emptiness. They are always terribly ashamed to do something. There may be aversion to one's body, especially to the chest (if it is a woman). One of my clients says that she would gladly cut off her breast, a completely worthless organ, and breastfeeding is generally a disgusting process.

Clients with dead mother-killing syndrome may have a history of depressive states or depression, panic attacks, and persecutory paranoia. They say that the whole world is hostile against them, everyone wants to harm them. This harm is often associated with fantasies of severe physical or sexual abuse, or saying that they will simply be killed for a phone, tablet, or just because they are surrounded by jerks. In parallel, they project their inner reality outside, then the people who surround them are “rednecks who only think how to get drunk and get fucked, or rob, beat or rape someone”, and of course they will definitely fall into this someone. Everyone envy them and only think about how to harm them.

For example, my client told me that I meet her with hatred all the time, in therapy I just endure her, if I didn’t hear her call on the phone, then I did it on purpose, because she disgusts me, and I know how she is going through and gets angry and anxious when I don't answer the phone right away, and I do it on purpose, only to hurt her, to mock her. And when I was really angry with her, the client's face became softer and there was a feeling as if she was eating and enjoying anger. After I drew attention to this, the client said that this is true, my anger is like a manifestation of love, care for her, only then she feels that I am not indifferent to her and have warm feelings.

In addition, women for her are “lustful bitches” (for the most part), and men are either “alpha males” (he speaks with contempt and disgust), or simply despicable creatures lying on the sofa and worth nothing, but also those and those in life, only one organ is leading - this is the penis. Her aggression is directed more inward, she does not scandalize at work and in the family, she methodically destroys herself. The only place in her life where she shows her displeasure without hiding her hatred, contempt, disgust for herself and others is psychotherapy. And immediately she kills herself again for this with toxic shame that she is abnormal, worthless, "I'm some kind of freak."

My own awareness of maternal destructiveness developed in psychotherapy before my pregnancy and blossomed during it. And a completely new round began immediately after the birth of the child. It was the most difficult round of all the previous ones. From my own experience and the experience of my clients, I can say that primary in a mother's murderous hostility against her child is the mother's conflict with her mother. This is an intergenerational conflict, and in each subsequent generation it becomes stronger and more pathogenic. Those. if the grandmother was just a dead mother, then her daughter is not just dead, but a murdering dead mother, but a granddaughter with a more pronounced murderous impulse, and the next generation can already physically kill the child. This is when newborns are thrown into garbage cans, they give birth in a (village) toilet, they kill themselves and a child or one child, because they did not know where to put him, she was afraid that her mother would kick her out, and the like.

I suggest that this increase in mortality in the next generation is due to the fact that the child's fear of cruel destruction by his mother requires an even stronger cruel destruction in order to be released. In addition, such an increase between generations is present only when the child had absolutely nowhere to “warm up.” Often the desire to kill your child is not realized. Dead mothers who kill are very difficult to realize their destructiveness, they are very afraid that they are going crazy, ashamed and repressing their lethality. And only when a strong trusting relationship is established can one slowly approach their fear as a desire to harm, kill.

I was lucky when I got pregnant, I was already in psychotherapy, but still I was afraid if I had lost my mind, and it was very terribly embarrassing to talk in therapy about what terrible thoughts I have in relation to my child, and awareness of my deadly murderousness caused unbearable pain.

The dead mother complex is a revelation of transference. The main complaints and symptoms with which the subject first turns to the psychoanalyst are not of a depressive nature. This symptomatology for the most part comes down to failures in affective, love and professional life, complicated by more or less acute conflicts with the immediate environment. It often happens that, by spontaneously telling the story of his personal life, the patient involuntarily makes the psychoanalyst think about the depression that should or could have occurred there and at that time in [the patient's] childhood, [about that depression] that the subject himself does not attribute values. This depression [only] occasionally, having sporadically reached clinical levels [in the past], will become apparent only in the transference. As for the present symptoms of classical neuroses, they are of secondary importance, or even if they are expressed, the psychoanalyst gets the feeling that an analysis of their genesis will not provide a clue to the solution of the conflict.

Andre Green. Dead mother.
Dedicated to Catherine Para

If it were necessary to select just one feature of the clear difference between how psychoanalysis is done today and how, as far as we can imagine, it was [carried out]1 in the past, then everyone would probably agree that it [this difference] is focused around the issue of grief.

That is what the title of this essay indicates: the dead mother. However, to avoid any misunderstanding, I will clarify that this work does not deal with the psychic consequences of the actual death of the mother; but rather [interprets the question] about a certain imago that takes shape in the child's psyche as a result of maternal depression, [imago], roughly transforming a living object, a source of vitality for the child, into a remote atonic, almost lifeless figure; [imago], which permeates very deeply the investments of some of the subjects we are analyzing; and [the imago] gravitating over their fate and over their future - libidinal, objective and narcissistic. The dead mother here, contrary to what might be expected, is the mother who remains alive; but in the eyes of the little child she cares for, she is, so to speak, mentally dead.

The consequences of a mother's actual death - especially if that death is the result of suicide - are devastating to the child she leaves behind. The symptomatology that develops here is directly related to this event, even if later psychoanalysis should discover that the irreparability of such a catastrophe is not causally related only to the mother-child relationship that preceded death. It may happen that even in these cases it would be possible to describe a type of relationship close to that which I am about to speak of. But the reality of the loss, its final and irreversible character, would retroactively change the previous relationship with the object. Therefore, I will not discuss the conflicts associated with this situation. Nor will I speak of the analyzes of those patients who sought the help of a psychoanalyst for apparently depressive symptoms. In fact, it is quite uncharacteristic for the analysands I am about to talk about in the course of preliminary discussions to highlight among the reasons that prompt them to go into psychoanalysis any depressive traits. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst immediately senses the narcissistic nature of the conflicts [they] mention, which have features of character neurosis and its consequences for [their] love life and professional activity.

This introductory part limits by elimination the clinical scope of what I am about to treat. I should briefly mention some of the references that were the second source - my patients were the first - of my reflections. Further reasoning is largely due to those authors who laid the foundations for all knowledge about the problem of grief: Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein. But it was mainly the latest researches of Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut2, Nicolas Abraham3 and Marja Torok4, as well as Guy Rosolato5 that set me on the path.

So, here are the starting postulates for my reasoning:
Psychoanalytic theory in its most commonly accepted form recognizes two postulates: the first is the postulate of the loss of an object as the main moment in the structuring of the human psyche, during which a new relationship to reality is established. From now on, the psyche will be governed by the reality principle, which begins to dominate the pleasure principle, although it [the psyche], however, also retains it [the pleasure principle]. This first postulate is a theoretical concept and not a fact of observation, since such [observation] would show us a gradual evolution rather than a mutational leap. The second postulate generally recognized by the majority of authors is [the postulate] about the depressive position, in different interpretations for both. This second postulate combines the fact of observation with the theoretical concepts of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. It should be emphasized that these two postulates are connected with the general situation [of the human lot] and refer us to the inevitable event of ontogeny. If previous disturbances in the relationship between mother and child make it difficult both to experience [loss of an object] and overcome [a depressive position], [then] the absence of such disturbances and the good quality of maternal care cannot save the child from [the need to experience and overcome] this period, which for his mental organization plays a structuring role. However, there are patients who, whatever [clinical] structure they represent, seem to suffer from persistence of depressive symptoms, more or less recurrent and more or less disabling, but seem to go beyond normal depressive reactions, the kind that everyone suffers from time to time. For we know that the subject who ignores [his] depression is probably more disturbed than the one who experiences it [depression] occasionally.

So, I ask myself here the following question: "What connection can be established between the loss of the object and the depressive position, as common [initial] data, and the peculiarity of the [described] depressive symptom complex, [clinically] central, but often drowning among other symptoms that are more or less disguises? What [mental] processes develop around this [depressive] center? What is this [depressive] center built of in [the patient's] psychic reality?"

dead father and dead mother

Based on the interpretation of Freud's thought, psychoanalytic theory gave the main place to the concept of the dead father, the fundamental significance of which in the genesis of the superego is emphasized in Totem and Taboo. The Oedipus complex is here regarded not simply as a stage of libidinal development, but as an [intrapsychic] structure; such a theoretical position has its own internal integrity. A whole conceptual ensemble flows from it: the Superego in classical theory, Law and Symbolism in Lacanian thought. Castration and sublimation, as the fate of drives, internally bind this ensemble with common references.

The dead mother, on the other hand, has never been considered structurally. In some cases, one can find isolated allusions to it, as in Marie Bonaparte's analysis of Edgar Allan Poe, which deals with a particular case of the early loss of a mother. But the narrow realism of the [author's] point of view imposes [and] here [its] limitations. This neglect [of the dead mother] cannot be explained in terms of the Oedipal situation, since this theme would have to arise either in connection with the Oedipus complex of the girl, or in connection with the negative Oedipus complex in the boy. In fact, the matter is different. Matricide does not imply a dead mother, on the contrary; as for the concept of the dead father, it supports the references of ancestors, filiations, genealogies, refers to the primitive crime and to the guilt that stems from it.

It is striking, however, that the [psychoanalytic] model of grief underlying this concept makes no mention of either maternity grief or weaning grief. If I mention this model, it is not only because it preceded the concept below, but also because it should be noted that there is no direct connection between them.

Freud, in Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety, relativized castration anxiety by including it in a series containing equally anxiety at the loss of the love of the object, anxiety at the threat of the loss of the object, anxiety at the superego, and anxiety at the loss of the protection of the superego. It is well known, however, how important he attached to the distinction between anxiety, pain, and grief. It is not my intention to discuss Freud's thoughts on this subject in detail - a deeper comment would take me away from the topic - but I want to make one remark. There is castration anxiety and repression anxiety. On the one hand, Freud was well aware that along with one and the other, there are many other forms of anxiety, as well as different types of repression or even other defense mechanisms. In both cases, he admits the existence of chronologically earlier forms of both anxiety and repression. And yet, in both cases, it is these - castration anxiety and repression - that occupy a central place [in Freud], and in relation to them all other types of anxiety and various types of repression, whether earlier or later, are considered; Freud's thought shows here its [double] character, [in understanding psychopathology] as structuring as it is genetic. A character that will come out even more clearly when he [Freud] turns Oedipus into a first fantasy, relatively independent of the opportunistic accidents that form the specificity of this patient. Thus, even in cases where he [Freud] states a negative Oedipus complex, as in Sergei Pankeev," he [Freud] will maintain that the father, the object of the patient's passive erotic desires, nevertheless remains a castrator.
This structural function [of castration anxiety] implies the concept of becoming a psychic order programmed by primary fantasies. Freud's epigones did not always follow him along this path. But it seems that French psychoanalytic thought as a whole, in spite of all disagreements, followed Freud in this matter. On the one hand, the castration reference model obligated the authors to, dare I say so, "castrate" all other forms of anxiety; in such cases one began to speak, for example, of anal or narcissistic castration. On the other hand, giving an anthropological interpretation of Freud's theory, all varieties of anxiety were reduced to the concept of lack in Lacan's theory. I believe, however, that the rescue of conceptual unity and generality in both cases went to the detriment of both practice and theory.

It would seem strange if, on this issue, I were to renounce the structural point of view that I have always defended. That is why I will not join those who divide anxiety into different kinds according to the time of its manifestation at different periods of the subject's life; but I will propose rather a structural conception which is organized around not a single center (or paradigm), but around at least two such centers (or paradigms), in accordance with the special character of each of them, different from those [centers or paradigms], what has been suggested so far.

It is rightly believed that castration anxiety structures the entire ensemble of anxieties associated with "a little thing separated from the body," whether it is a penis, feces, or a child. This class [of anxieties] is united by the constant reference to castration in the context of self-mutilation associated with bloodshed. I attach more importance to the "red" aspect of this anxiety than to its connection with a partial object.

On the contrary, when it comes to the concept of breast loss or object loss, or the threats associated with loss or superego patronage, or, in general, all the threats of abandonment, the context is never bloody. Of course, all forms of anxiety are accompanied by destructiveness, castration too, since the wound is always the result of destruction. But this destructiveness has nothing to do with bloody mutilation. She is of mourning colors: black or white. Black, like severe depression; white, like those states of emptiness to which attention is now so justifiably given.

My hypothesis is that the gloomy blackness of depression, which we can legitimately attribute to the hatred that shows up in the psychoanalysis of depressed patients, is only a by-product, an effect rather than a cause, of the "white" anxiety that betrays the loss; [loss] suffered on a narcissistic level.

I will not go back to what I believe is already known from my descriptions of negative hallucination and white psychosis, and will place white anxiety or white grief in the same series. The "white" series - negative hallucination, white psychosis and white grief, all related to what might be called a clinic of emptiness or a clinic of negativity - is the result of one of the components of the primary repression, namely: a massive radical disinvestment that leaves traces in the unconscious in the form of "mental holes" to be filled by reinvestments, [but these reinvestments will only be] an expression of the destructiveness released by such a weakening of the libidinal erotica.

The manifestation of hatred and subsequent processes of reparation are secondary manifestations of the central disinvestment of the primary maternal object. It is clear that such a view changes everything, even the technique of psychoanalysis, since [it is now clear that any] self-restraint [of the psychoanalyst] in interpreting hatred in structures with depressive features only leads to the fact that the primary core of this formation remains forever intact.

The Oedipus complex must be preserved as an indispensable symbolic matrix, which forever remains for us the most important reference, even in cases where one speaks of pregenital or preoedipal regression, for this reference implicitly refers us to axiomatic triangulation. However far the psychoanalysis of the disinvestment of the primary object may advance, it is the fate of the human psyche to always have two objects and never one; no matter how far attempts to trace the concept of the primitive (phylogenetic) Oedipus complex go, the father as such is present there, even in the form of his penis (I mean Melanie Klein's archaic concept of the father's penis in the mother's stomach). The father, he is here at the same time with the mother, and with the child, and from the very beginning. More precisely, between mother and child. On the part of the mother, this is expressed in her desire for the father, the realization of which is the child. On the part of the child, everything that anticipates the existence of a third, whenever the mother is not fully present, and [whenever] the investment of the child by her, is neither total nor absolute; [then, every time], at least in the child's illusions about the mother up to what is commonly called the loss of the object, [all this] will, in the aftermath, be connected with the father.

Thus, one can understand the continuity of the links between this metaphorical loss of the breast, the [subsequent] symbolic mutation of the relationship between pleasure and reality (raised by the aftereffect into principles), with the prohibition of incest and with the double image of mother and father, potentially connected in the fantasy of a hypothetical primal scene conceived outside the subject, in which the subject is absent and established in the absence of [its] affective representation, which [but then] gives rise to [his] fantasy, the product of [his] subjective "madness".

Why this metaphor? The appeal to metaphor, indispensable for any essential element of psychoanalytic theory, [becomes] especially necessary here. In a previous work, I noted that Freud had two versions of breast loss. The first version, theoretical and conceptual, is presented in his article on "refusing" Freud here speaks [of breast loss] as a basic, unique, instantaneous and decisive event; indeed, it can be said that this event [subsequently] has a fundamental effect on the function of judgment. On the other hand, in A Brief Essay on Psychoanalysis, he takes a descriptive rather than a theoretical position, as if he were engaged in observations of babies that are so fashionable today. Here he interprets this phenomenon not theoretically, but, so to speak, "narratively", where it becomes clear that such a loss is a process of gradual, step by step, evolution. However, in my opinion, the descriptive and theoretical approaches are mutually exclusive, just as perception and memory are mutually exclusive in theory. Recourse to such a comparison is not just an analogy. In the "theory" that the subject develops about himself, the mutational interpretation is always retrospective. [Only] in the aftereffect is formed that theory of the lost object, which acquires its character as a fundamental, unique, instantaneous, decisive and, I dare say, crushing [loss]. The appeal to metaphor is justified not only from a diachronic point of view, but also from a synchronic one. . The most ardent proponents of breast references in contemporary psychoanalysis, the Kleinians, now admit, humbly adding water to their wine, that the breast is nothing more than a word for mother, to the delight of non-Kleinian theorists who often psychologize psychoanalysis. The metaphor of the breast must be preserved, since the breast, like the penis, cannot be only symbolic. No matter how intense the pleasure of sucking associated with a nipple or with a nipple, erogenous pleasure powerfully regains in the mother everything that is not the breast: her smell, skin, look and a thousand other components of which the mother is “made”. The metonymic object becomes a metaphor for the object.

By the way, it can be noted that we have no difficulty in reasoning in a similar way when we talk about love sexual relationships, reducing the whole ensemble, in general, rather complex relationships, to penis-vagina copulation and correlating [all] perturbations [of this ensemble] with castration anxiety.

It is understandable, then, that in delving into the problems associated with the dead mother, I treat her as a metaphor, independent of grief for a real object.

dead mother complex

The dead mother complex is a revelation of transference. The main complaints and symptoms with which the subject first turns to the psychoanalyst are not of a depressive nature. This symptomatology for the most part comes down to failures in affective, love and professional life, complicated by more or less acute conflicts with the immediate environment. It often happens that, by spontaneously telling the story of his personal life, the patient involuntarily makes the psychoanalyst think about the depression that should or could have occurred there and at that time in [the patient's] childhood, [about that depression] that the subject himself does not attribute values. This depression [only] occasionally, having sporadically reached clinical levels [in the past], will become apparent only in the transference. As for the present symptoms of classical neuroses, they are of secondary importance, or even if they are expressed, the psychoanalyst gets the feeling that an analysis of their genesis will not provide a clue to the solution of the conflict. On the contrary, the narcissistic problem comes to the fore, within the framework of which the requirements of the Ideal I are exorbitant, in synergy or in opposition to the Super-I. There is a feeling of powerlessness. Powerlessness to get out of a conflict situation, powerlessness to love, use one's talents, multiply one's achievements, or, if any, deep dissatisfaction with their results.

When psychoanalysis begins, however, the transference sometimes opens quite soon, but more often after long years of psychoanalysis, a unique depression of its kind. The psychoanalyst develops a sense of inconsistency between transference depression (a term I have proposed for this case to contrast it with transference neurosis) and external behavior [of the patient], which depression does not affect, since there is nothing to indicate that it will become obvious to the environment [of the patient]. ], which, however, does not prevent his relatives from suffering from those object relations that the analysand imposes on them.

This transference depression does not point to anything other than a recurrence of infantile depression, the characteristics of which I find it useful to clarify.

Here we are not talking about depression from the real loss of the object, [that is], I want to say that it is not about the problem of real separation from the object that has left the subject. Such a fact may be present, but it is not the basis of the dead mother complex. The main feature of this depression is that it develops in the presence of an object immersed in its grief. The mother, for one reason or another, became depressed. The variety of etiological factors here is very large. Of course, among the main causes of such maternal depression we find the loss of a beloved object: a child, a relative, a close friend, or any other object strongly invested by the mother. But it can also be a depression of disappointment that inflicts a narcissistic wound: the vicissitudes of fate in one's own family or in the family of parents; the love affair of a father leaving his mother; humiliation, etc. In any case, the sadness of the mother and the decrease in [her] interest in the child are in the foreground.

It is important to emphasize that, as [already] understood by all authors, the most severe case is the death of [another] child at an early age. I especially strongly want to point out such a cause [of maternal depression], which completely eludes the child, because [at the beginning] he does not have enough data by which he could know about it [this reason], [and to that extent] its retrospective recognition [ remains] forever impossible, because it [this reason] is kept secret, [namely], - a miscarriage in the mother, which in the analysis has to be reconstructed according to the smallest signs. [This] hypothetical, of course, construction [about a miscarriage only and] gives coherence to [various] manifestations of [analytical] material attributed by the subject [himself] to the subsequent history [of his life].

Then there is a sharp, indeed mutational, change in the maternal imago. The presence in the subject of genuine liveliness, suddenly stopped [in development], learning to cling and frozen in [this] stupor, indicates that until some time with his mother [he] had a happy and [affectively] rich relationship. The child felt loved, despite all the unforeseen accidents that even the most ideal relationship does not exclude. From the photos in the family album, a cheerful, cheerful, inquisitive baby, full of [undiscovered] abilities, looks [at us], while later photos testify to the loss of this primary happiness. Everything will be finished, as with disappeared civilizations, the cause of the death of which historians are vainly looking for, putting forward a hypothesis about a seismic shock that destroyed the palace, temple, buildings and dwellings, from which nothing remained but ruins. Here, the catastrophe is limited to the [formation] of a cold core, which [although] will be bypassed in further [development], but leaves an indelible mark on the erotic investments of the subjects in question.

The transformation of the mental life of the child at the moment of abrupt disinvestment by his mother in [her] sudden grief is experienced by him as a catastrophe. Nothing foretold that love would be lost so suddenly. It doesn't take long to explain what kind of narcissistic trauma such a change represents. However, it should be emphasized that it [trauma] consists in premature disappointment and entails, in addition to the loss of love, the loss of meaning, since the baby does not find any explanation that allows him to understand what happened. It is clear that if he [the child] experiences himself as the center of the mother's universe, then, of course, he will interpret this disappointment as a consequence of his attraction to the object. It is especially unfavorable if the dead mother complex develops at the moment the child discovers the existence of a third, the father, and if the new investment is interpreted by him as the cause of maternal disinvestment. Be that as it may, triangulation in these cases develops prematurely and unsuccessfully. For either, as I have just said, the diminution of mother's love is attributed to the father's mother's investment, or this diminution [of her love] will provoke a particularly intense and premature investment of the father as a savior from the conflict that is playing out between child and mother. In reality, however, the father most often does not respond to the helplessness of the child. This is how the subject [turns out to be] sandwiched between: the mother - dead, and the father - inaccessible, whether it be the father, who is most concerned about the state of the mother, but does not come to the aid of the child, or whether it is the father who leaves both, and mother and child, by himself get out of this situation.

After the child has made futile attempts to reparate the mother, absorbed in her grief and making him feel the full measure of his impotence, after he has experienced both the loss of motherly love and the threat of losing the mother herself, and has struggled with anxiety by various active means, such as agitation, insomnia or night terrors, I will apply a series of defenses of a different kind.

The first and most important [protection] will be the [soul] movement, one in two persons: the disinvestment of the mother object and the unconscious identification with the dead mother. Mainly affective, this disinvestment [concerns] also [mental] representations and is a psychic murder of the object, committed without hatred. It is clear that maternal grief forbids any occurrence and a [small] share of hatred that can cause even greater damage to her image. This operation of disinvestment of the mother image does not result from any destructive drives, [but] the result is a hole in the fabric of the object relationship with the mother; [all] this does not interfere with [the child's] maintenance of [the mother's] peripheral investments; just as the mother continues to love him and continues to deal with him, [even] feeling powerless to love [him] in [her] grief, which has so changed her basic attitude towards the child. [But] all the same, as they say, "the heart does not lie with him." The other side of disinvestment is the primary identification with the object. Mirror identification becomes almost obligate after complementarity reactions (artificial gaiety, agitation, etc.) have failed. Reactional symmetry - by the type of [showing] sympathy [for her reactions] - turns out [here] the only possible means of restoring closeness with the mother. But the real goal of [such] mimeticism is not in the true reparation of [the parent object], but in preserving the [already] impossible possession of the object, to have it, becoming not the same as it [the object], but itself. Identification - a condition both for the rejection of the object, and at the same time for its preservation according to the cannibal type - is obviously unconscious. Such identification [together with disinvestment] occurs without the knowledge of the I-subject and against his will; this [is] its difference from other, further [just as] unconsciously occurring, disinvestments, since these other cases involve getting rid of the [subject] from the object, [at the same time] the withdrawal of [object investments] turns in favor of [the subject]. Hence - and its [identification] alienating character. In further object relations, the subject, having become a victim of repetition obsession, will, repeating the previous defense, actively disinvest [any] object that risks disappointing [him, the subject], but what will remain completely unconscious for him is [his] identification with the dead mother, with which from now on he will be connected in the disinvestment of traces of trauma.

The second fact is, as I have [already] stressed, the loss of meaning. The "construction" of the breast, of which pleasure is both the cause, the goal, and the guarantor, collapsed all at once and for no reason. Even imagining the reversal of the situation by the subject who, in negative megalomania, ascribes to himself the responsibility for the change, there remains an impassable gulf between the offense for which the subject could reproach himself and the intensity of the mother's reaction. The most he can think of is that, rather than with any forbidden desire, this offense is connected with his [subject's] way of being; Indeed, henceforth he is forbidden to be. Due to the vulnerability of the maternal image, the external expression of destructive aggressiveness is impossible; such a state of [things], which [otherwise] would push the child to let himself die, forces him to find someone responsible for the mother's gloomy mood, be it [even] a scapegoat. This role is assigned to the father. In any case, I repeat, there is a premature triangulation in which the child, the mother, and the unknown object of maternal grief are present. The unknown object of grief and the father then condense, forming in the child an early Oedipus complex.

This whole situation of loss of meaning entails the opening of a second front of defenses. The development of a secondary hatred that is neither primary nor fundamental; [secondary hatred], appearing in the desires of regressive incorporation, and at the same time - from anal positions colored by manic sadism, where it is a question of dominating the object, defiling it, taking revenge on it, etc.

Autoerotic arousal consists in seeking pure sensual pleasure, almost organ pleasure, without tenderness, without pity, not necessarily accompanied by sadistic fantasies, but remaining [forever] marked by restraint in [one's] love for the object. This [restraint] will serve as the basis for future hysterical identifications. There is a premature dissociation between body and soul, between sensuality and tenderness, and a blockade of love. An object is searched for by its ability to launch an isolated enjoyment of one or more erogenous zones, without merging in mutual enjoyment of two more or less integral objects. Finally, and most importantly, the search for a lost meaning structures the premature development of fantasmatic and intellectual abilities of the I. in the freedom to play, but in the compulsion to imagine, just as intellectual development fits into the compulsion to think. Efficiency and self-repair go hand in hand towards the same goal: by overcoming the turmoil of breast loss and retaining that ability, to create a carrier breast, a patch of cognitive tissue designed to mask the disinvestment hole, while secondary hatred and erotic arousal seethe at the abyss at the edge. . Such overinvested intellectual activity necessarily carries with it a significant amount of projection. Contrary to popular belief, projection is not always [implies] a false judgment. Projection is determined not by the truth or falsity of what is being projected, but by the operation of transferring to the outer scene (even the scene of the object) the investigation and even divination about what must be rejected and destroyed inside. The child has had the brutal experience of being dependent on the mother's mood swings. From now on, he will devote his efforts to divination or anticipation.

The compromised unity of the I, henceforth full of holes, is realized either on the plane of fantasy, opening the way for artistic creativity, or on the plane of knowledge, [serving] as a source of intellectual wealth. It is clear that we are dealing with attempts to cope with a traumatic situation. But this coping is doomed to failure. Not that it failed where it took the theater [of war] action. [Although] such premature idealized sublimations come from immature and undoubtedly [too] hasty psychic formations, I see no reason, short of falling into a normative ideology, to dispute their authenticity [as sublimations]. Their failure lies elsewhere. These sublimations will reveal their inability to play a balancing role in the psychic economy, since at one point the subject remains especially vulnerable - as far as his love life is concerned. In this area, [any] wound will awaken [such] psychic pain that we will only have to observe the rebirth of the dead mother, who, returning to the forefront during the crisis, will destroy all the sublimation achievements of the subject, which, however, are not lost [forever], but [only] are temporarily blocked. Either love will [suddenly] again revive the development of sublimated achievements, then [themselves] these last [sublimations] will try to unblock love. For a moment, they [love and sublimation] can combine their efforts, but soon the destructiveness will exceed the capabilities of the subject, who [the subject] does not have the necessary investments, [neither] to maintain a long-term object relationship, [nor] to gradually build up a deep personal involvement that requires care about other. So [every] Attempt to [fall in love] turns into [only] the inevitable disappointment of either the object or the [own] Self, returning [the subject] to the familiar feeling of failure and impotence. The patient has a feeling that a curse is hanging over him, the curse of a dead mother who will not die in any way and is holding him captive. Pain, that narcissistic feeling, comes out. She [pain] is the suffering constantly inflicted by the edges of the [narcissistic] wound, coloring all investments, restraining the manifestations of [and] hatred, [and] erotic arousal, and breast loss. In psychic pain it is [just as] impossible to hate as [and] to love, impossible to enjoy, even masochistically, impossible to think. There is only a feeling of bondage, which takes away the I from itself and alienates it [I] in an unimaginable image [of a dead mother].

The route of the subject resembles the pursuit of a non-introjected object, without the possibility of abandoning it or losing it, all the more, without the possibility of accepting its introjection into the Self invested by the dead mother. In general, the objects of a [given] subject always remain on the verge of the Self - and not quite inside, and not quite outside. And it is no coincidence, because the place - in the center - is occupied by a dead mother.

For a long time, the psychoanalysis of these subjects was carried out through the study of classical conflicts: the Oedipus complex, pregenital fixations, anal and oral. Repression involving infantile sexuality [or] aggressiveness has been relentlessly interpreted. Progress has certainly been made. But for the psychoanalyst, this [progress] was not very convincing, even if the analysand, for his part, tried to console himself by emphasizing those aspects with which he could be pleased.

In fact, all this psychoanalytic work remains an occasion for a spectacular collapse, where everything [suddenly] appears as on the first day, to the point that [once] the analysand states that he can no longer continue to deceive himself, and feels compelled to declare the inconsistency [namely] of the transference object - the psychoanalyst, despite [all] the twists of relations with the objects of lateral transferences, which [also] helped him avoid touching the central core of the conflict.