The Secret of the Dead Mother

Juan Bielsa, Ausencia

Within her tight embrace the entombed child finds solace, a shelter that offers the certainties of death over the vagaries of life. This is her magical bequest: relief from the anxieties of freedom through submission to a powerful other; sustenance of the omnipotence of holding the life of another in one’s hands; disguise of aggressive intent hidden behind a mask of suffering; and finally I am tempted to say, a terminal holding off in a perpetuity of a recognition of loss. 

For the deepest secret of the dead mother is that she never dies. No one ever has to die. Some secrets are too tempting to resist. A simple trade is sufficient: “give your life over to me now and we will always remain together”. (p.115-116)

[...]What is dead about the dead mother? After all, everything Green points to reminds us that this is a peculiarly lively corpse. Indeed, few of the living exercise such vital power (p.120)

[...] Dead doesn't fully capture the power of this object. We find an object that is more accurately described as "compressing" or "entrapping" rather than lifeless. A centrifuge object whose gravity won't let anything escape. In another vocabulary it is bad rather than absent , whether re-introjecting projections of envy and hatred (Klein), or as a repository of unmet need (Fairbrain). Above all, to borrow an idea of Anne Alvarez (1997), it is a useless object. That is the dead mother fails in its role of providing a refuge of sufficient strenght and flexibility to allow the subject to leave it behind. In sum we find less a dead object, than an object that is deadening (p.121)

[...] Death is not the enemy; the horror is to be suspended between life and death. This is the fate of the dead and deadening object relations of the dead mother complex: to be suspended between the living and the dead. John Steiner (1993) has written of a hald-dead state where both object and self are tormented, but not allowed to die. This state is a psychic retreat from the full measure of guilt and loss that separation from objects entails. In such a state, it is the agency of the subject (an agency brimming with desire, aggression, sex, murder, sufficiency, separatness) that remains suspended. Psychic retreat (or in Jean Wolff Bernstein's felicitous phrase, psychic exile) is an attempt to assuage the angry gods by playing dead (Wold-Besrtein, 1996) (p.122)

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