Annette Baier on "Second Persons"

Quote lifted from my Dad's MA thesis: "The Gift and Labour of Gratitude". 

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

Jacqueline Rose, Mothers

Reading this book made me feel like I should read it annually.

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