The Clinical Approach to The Dead Mother Syndrome

Amy Tuso, With You

[…] The problem in the analysis of the dead mother complex is that another irresistible bargain is forged once we listen in on its secrets. A new covenant is inevitably whispered in the patient’s ear, and we find ourselves offering the analysis as the latest version of an old alliance, as a new dead mother. For who really dares to awaken the dead from their sleep? (p.116)

[…] Andre Green holds out Winnicott’s essay on “The use of an object and relating through identifications” as a model for clinical approaches to the dead mother. Winnicott (1968) leaves an intriguing footnote” “the next task of the worker in the field of transitional phenomena is to restate the problem in terms of disposal” (p.91). […] (p.117)

[…] To coax the subject beyond their funeral vault demands a psychoanalysis of “paradoxical absence”. That is to say the therapeutic task is to raise the possibility of constituting absence, in place of an adherence to undeadness. Yet this absence must re-present an opening out, up, into a potential presence. In Green’s language, the some-thing of absence must take the space of the no-thing that the dead mother “unpresents”(p.122-123)

Sekoff, J (1999) The undead: necromancy and the inner world. In G. Kohon (Ed.) The dead mother: the work of Andre Green (pp. 109-127), London: Routledge