Breaks in Unity: The Caesura of Birth

ABSTRACT

Focused on the Bionian caesura, this paper suggests that the existential caesura of birth always belongs to both mother and infant. During that process of being “born,” the mother, too, experiences a line of breaks—breaks of time and space, of meaning, of continuity, and of boundaries—all related to an emotional and physical reorganization of boundaries and therefore to the unity of the self. This position statement presents the notion of “Breaks in Unity” and discusses the unspoken aspects of childbirth and the transition to motherhood.

Notes

¹ See more on the transition to motherhood in recent studies such as The Making of Modern Motherhood Study (Thomson et al., 2011) and Knowing Mothers: Researching Maternal Identity (Hollway, 2015).

² Describing the infant’s early experience, Anzieu (1989) writes that initially, the skin is a concrete as well as symbolic envelope of mental and emotional contents. If that envelope is damaged, there is no sense of boundary that can hold the self together. The surface of the body is the sensory organ, and as Freud (1923) describes, the ego is preliminary a bodily ego (see also Mitrani, 1996).

³ I emphasize the psychological aspect, where the vagina is the literal and symbolic entrance into a woman’s body and mind, but I believe that the vagina exists in every unconscious; we were all born from a woman and in that sense it represents not only an entry into mind and body but also the exit to the world, the ability to be born and reborn, and the continuum within that caesura.

⁴ Winnicott’s (1956) concept of Primary Maternal Preoccupation provides an important observation (albeit from a point of view of a man, a doctor) of the new mother’s state of “almost illness” (p. 302). My fundamental disagreement with Winnicott is related to his assumption that this emotional phase is only about the mother’s preoccupation with the baby’s needs. I argue that what he observed belongs to mother’s subjective experience of her own mind and body and isn’t only a phase in the service of adaptation to the baby’s needs. I believe that Winnicott’s interpretation had a social and political agenda to recruit the mother’s subjectivity in the service of babies and society and reflects his own need to idealize motherhood.

⁵ In my attempt to bring the maternal body into discourse, I enter the controversial debate between Difference Feminism (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and others) and gender constructivists (Butler and others). I suggest a bidirectional process where it’s not only the structure of certain thought processes that influences the body but also the morphology of the body that is reflected in our thought processes. I am aware of and challenge the heteronormative cultural aspect (see more in Atlas-Koch, 2011, and Atlas, 2012) and the view of permanent, fixed essential human nature and certainly agree that cultural narratives and myths influence the telling of the biological story. Here I suggest that when it comes to the actual physical experience of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, the body has a particular structure, which postmodern gender theory, an otherwise important correction, too often tends to deemphasize.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Galit Atlas

Galit Atlas, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City. Atlas is the author of The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015). She is on the faculty at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, faculty at the Four Year Adult and National Training Programs at National Institute for the Psychotherapies. She serves on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and is the author of articles and book chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. Atlas is a contributor to The New York Times and writes essays elucidating psychoanalysis for the general public.