The Eroticism of the Maternal: So What If Everything Is About the Mother?

Abstract

The “erotic” bond between the mother and the infant is often idealized as the epitome of the preoedipal, prerepressive utopia in the blissful image of the naked and sacred mother-infant dyad. This article problematizes such a utopian image by identifying the core fantasy underlying that which is maternal. My discussion looks at the mother both as the object of erotic fantasy and the subject who is doing the fantasizing. This study brings together two seemingly disparate theoretical notions, Lacanian feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray's argument about our culture's relationship with the mother and Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi's study of amae. I argue that what Irigaray calls “desire of/for the mother” and what Doi attempted to explain using the everyday Japanese word, amae, a wish to “depend and presume upon another's love or bask in another's indulgence,” are both what is understood in the clinical psychoanalytic language as maternal erotic transference.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Dr. Angelika Bammer, Dr. Cheryl Crowley, and Dr. Beth Seelig for their intellectual support and guidance and for conversations that inspired and clarified my thinking at the very early stages of this project. Dr. Martha Hadley and the anonymous reviewers of the original paper gave me feedback that encouraged me to revise and improve this article. I am most indebted to Dr. Stephen Hartman for his thoughtful reading and editing of my draft. It is his insightful suggestions that brought this article into its current form.

Notes

¹Translation mine.

²For example, in one of her most well-known poems, Itō writes, “Six months pass/Kanoko's teeth come in and/She bites my nipple, wants to bite my/nipple off/Always looking for the chance to bite it off/ … /I want to throw Kanoko away/ … /Throw away or kill Kanoko who bites my/nipple off” (“Killing Kanoko” [Itō, 1985, p. 48], trans. S. Nakayasu).

³“L'Incontournable volume,” Speculum: De l'autre femme (Paris, France: Minuit, 1974), trans. G. C. Gill as “Volume-fluidity” in Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

⁴Doi did not invent the word amae. It is an everyday Japanese word. Doi's contribution, then, is not that he “discovered” amae but that he identified the core fantasy underlying amae. Interpreting amae as “dependent attitude” can be misleading because it only refers to the everyday use of the word, not to the underlying fantasy that can be both infantile and creative, masochistic and therapeutic.

⁵The concept of amae has been susceptible to various criticisms, more as yet another version of nihonjinron—“Japanese uniqueness” argument—than as a psychoanalytic concept, but such a debate is beyond the scope of this article. See Frank Johnson (1993) for a summary of “Japanese uniqueness” debate concerning amae.

⁶ Amaeru is the verb form of amae.

⁷Among the most well-known proponents of this notion in Japan is a Jungian psychologist Hayao Kawai, author of Bosei shakai Nihon no byōri [The pathology of Japan as a maternal society] (Tokyo, Japan: Kōdansha, 1976).