“The (M)other We Fall in Love With Wants to be There”: Reply to Commentaries

Abstract

Inspired by the three insightful commentaries, I reflect on the tension between descriptive and prescriptive agendas in my book Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life (2004). My primary goal was to theorize the desire to care for children, an area I argue has been relatively neglected in psychoanalysis and feminism. But my own passionate conviction about the value to a mother of time with her children occasionally limited my scope. Engaging Clements's critique, I analyze the tendency of discussions about motherhood to become polarized, and I offer a Kleinian perspective on these dynamics. Finally, I broaden the book's purview to consider clinical cases where the defensive or narcissistic functions of maternal devotion interfere with a woman's ability to relate to her child and her partner.

I thank Nancy Chodorow, Dianne Elise, and Wendy Stern for many helpful discussions.

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Notes on contributors

Daphne de Marneffe

Daphne de Marneffe, Ph.D., is guest faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the author of Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life (2004, Little Brown and Company).