Dead Mother, Dead Child

 Egon Schiele, Dead Mother

But is the dead mother’s death not a personal death? How could it be regarded as an event from the real?

Depression often descends upon selves. Although it has a psychic origin and unconscious meaning, it may overcome the self the way a virus grips the soma. The kind of death suffered by the mother in the dead mother complex is also dead as a psychic event at the time of its occurrence; although it has meaning, the meaning is lost to the mother experiencing it. 

 [..] The dead mother refuses her own moods, killing off contact with the processes of inner life. As she dissociated herself from her affects, she stands as a continually stricken witness to the unforeseen misfortunes imposed upon her by lived experience and its after-effects. After-effects are not for her; she is dead to them (p.100)

Green (1983) writes: The transformation in psychical life, at the moment of the mother’s sudden bereavement when she has become abruptly detached from her infant is experienced by the child as a catastrophe; because, without any warning signal, love has been lost at one blow. (p.150)

It was this loss, in one blow that [the patient] presented to me in the transference in the early years of our work; a loss that took the form of a sudden change of his mood, without warning, indeed without any apparent meaningful affective context to himself. His own transformed moods seemed not to be of his own making. And although he acted these blows upon the other, more often and more pertinently, he enacted maternal detachment, by suddenly acting out an apparent passing idea, and abandoning any sentient effort to comprehend himself in the moment of the enactment. (p.104)

[…] the abruptness released by [the patient] was for him a form of self abandonment, a “meaningless” indifference to his own fate. Actions committed by the self seemed not to be of the self. They were the work of some other. And in this respect, such an odd attitude-customarily seen in psychoanalysis as the split –off portion of the personality-was in fact a recollection of an early fact of his life.(p.105)

The catastrophe of abrupt detachment, argues Green (1983), “constitutes a premature disillusionment and…carries in its wake, besides the loss of love, the loss of meaning, for the baby disposes of no explication to account for what has happened (p.150)

Arrested in their capacity to love, subjects who are under the empire of the dead mother can only aspire to autonomy. Sharing remains forbidden to them. Thus, solitude, which was a situation creating anxiety and to be avoided, changes sign. From negative it becomes positive. Having previously been shunned, it is now sought after. The subject nestles into it. He becomes his own mother, but remains prisoner to her economy of survival. He thinks he has got rid of his dead mother. In fact, she only leaves him in peace in the measure the she herself is left in peace. As long as there is no candidate to the succession, she can well let her child survive, certain to be the only one to possess this inaccessible love. (Green, 1983, p.156) (p.105)

Bollas, C (1999) Dead mother, dead child. In G. Kohon (Ed.) The dead mother: the work of Andre Green (pp. 87-108), London: Routledge

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