Standing at the Water’s Edge: Manymothers in African American Culture

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to initiate a discourse that connects allomothers, endemic to African culture, with collective manymothering attachments from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper illuminates the process by which, beginning with West Africa, Black mothers adapted and carried the process of mothering with them to provide consistent nurturing, responsiveness, and attunement to their infants’ and children’s needs. This process of extending caregiving responsibilities to the community at large, which I have labeled manymothering, has created generations of resistance and resilience that have supported Black people to the present. The psychoanalytic lens of othermothers serves as an adaptive familial structure that has been sustained through intergenerational resilient transmission. The linkage between culture and spirituality as a means of ameliorating trauma and promoting resilience was examined.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Valerie Bryant

Valerie Bryant, Ph.D., LCSW, EMDR, SEP is a relational psychoanalyst in private practice in Fort Greene Brooklyn specializing in complex developmental trauma, relational betrayal, and dissociative conditions. She teaches adjunct at NYU Silver School of Social Work. She is on faculty, a trauma supervisor, and a board member at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.