The Dead Mother- Andre Green: An introduction

Yarrow Summers, Grace

The dead mother is a concept that refers to “an imago which has been constituted in the child’s mind, following maternal depression, brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a distant figure, toneless, practically inanimate, deeply impregnating the cathexes of certain patients…and weighing on the destiny of their object-libidinal and narcissistic future.[...]

[The] dead mother is a mother who remains alive but who is, so to speak, psychically dead in the eyes of the young child in her care (Green, 1983 p. 142) (p.2)

“In any event the mother’s sorrow and lessening of interest in her infant are in foreground” (ibid., p.149). Love is suddenly lost for the child; there is a transformation in the infant’s world which produces a psychical catastrophe: loss of love is followed by loss of meaning; for the child, nothing makes sense anymore.

Nevertheless, the infant needs to survive a life without meaning (one way or another) and for that he/she might develop a compulsion to imagine (frantic need for play), and/or a compulsion to think (which promotes intellectual development). There is a hole in the child’s psychic world, but this might be covered by a “patched breast” (ibid., p.152) […] Artistic creativity and productive intellectualization are possible outcomes for the dead mother complex. But this cannot be accomplished without a price being paid: the subject will remain “vulnerable on a particular point, which is his love life” (ibid., p.153). It is in this second instance, in the subject’s incapacity for love, where the identification with the dead mother appears more clearly. (p.3-4)

Love, then, is not possible […] Impossibility of sharing. Solitude, actively sought because it gives the subject the illusion that the dead mother has left him/her alone. There is, in all cases- says Green- a regression to anality and a use of reality as a defence: “Fantasy must only be fantasy” (ibid.,p.158)

“The patient is strongly attached to the analysis-the analysis more than the analyst”. […] The lack of transferential passion is justified by the appeal to reality: if there is any hint of seduction that takes place is “in the area of the intellectual quest”. And yet, after all is said and done […] one can discover something else in the transference: “ behind the dead mother complex, behind the blank mourning for the mother, one catches a glimpse of the mad passion of which she is, and remains, the object, that renders mourning for her an impossible experience” (ibid, p. 162) (p.4)

Kohon, G. (1999) Introduction. In G. Kohon (Ed.), The dead mother: the work of Andre Green (pp. 1-9). London: Routledge