Some reference notes and a passage:
- Perfection and mother’s ambivalence - failure should not be seen as catastrophic but necessary and normal
- Winnicott and healthy hating
- Winnicott and the false self
- Mothers as scapegoat
- Bettelheim and hating/blaming mothers for child’s destruction
- Birth/labour akin to war
- Clytemnestra pleading with her son Orestes to save her life by exposing her breast - an effort to remind him of their intimacy and her having fed and sustained him - which does not work and he kills her
- Cultural and psychoanalytic ignoring of the mother’s erotic pleasure breastfeeding her baby (and the few sources that do address it)
- Erasure of mothers’ sexuality and the idealisation of mothers
- How can/should a mother bear her daughter’s protests without shattering? How can mothers really hear and listen to their children?
- Hoping not that your child is happy but that they develop a rich, independent life
- Elena Ferrante and mothers with blurred margins
