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

On the Significance of Absence

Certain patients, or better psychical constellations, come to revolve around the proposition that “all I have got is what I have not got”. This negative presence becomes the gravity of a psyche founded upon loss. [...]. 

For Green, Bion and Winnicott the absent other marks the place, names the conditions which allow thought, being or vitality to move forward or inversely, becomes the graveyard of the subject, where attacks on linking(negative K) (Bion, 1959), unintegration (Winnicott, 1963) or madness (Green, 1986c) reign. 

Absence may seize hold of us, shadow us, propel us toward oblivion, yet absence is also constitutive, creative, a necessary condition for vital and alive psychic life. “Absence is an intermediary situation between presence (as far as intrusion) and loss (as far as annihilation)” (Green, 1986a, p.50), “In this context, absence does not mean loss, but potential presence”(Green, 1986b, p.293)

To constitute absence may be among our most vital tasks. For Bion,  thought, love and transformation exist only in relation to their negatives. The absent (to be without memory or desire) is a call to the potential emergence of the positive. Winnicott treasured the place not to be communicated, the solitude that allows self-emergence, and the destructiveness that embodies the other as separate and apart from ourselves. For his part, Green elevates the absence to a form of creative structure.

[…]The potential space created within this frame allows a subjectivity to emerge, with its vital affects and thoughts intact. By way of negative demonstration, he depicts the dead mother as never absent, overfilling an inadequate psychic space.[….] Nothing can truly enter this dense space, and nothing can truly emerge from it.[…] Only absence allows new thought and fresh experience.  (p.114)

[…] The analytic work must be balanced between a project of representing absence and offering a framing structure of its own, a psychic envelop (Anzieu, 1990) constituted through the homologues of the analytic object. Only living under, within, and between the skin (and skin-ego) of the analytic couple may an alternative to the grim offerings of the dead mother be sought. (p.115)

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