I hate (love) my mother

....thinking about childhood and motherhood and loathing and, naturally, abjection. How depressing it sounds, but it is not...not really. If we can recognize, define and understand it (after all, we are human, and we are, for the most part, arrogant like that) we can somehow feel we control it (even if we can't).

What is it about the mother? Freud cannot deal with her fully -- he has trouble with the preoedipal mother because she threatens his idea of patriarchal authority (comment 1), the threat of castration that brings on the rejection of the maternal body.

How do we define mother? And when? How do we define father? Are they always, forever in opposition to one another? Does each definition, our own personal definition, result from the love(hate) for each one, or is it all about the swallowing up and vomiting out of the mother to get at the father? I tend to think that part of what is at the base of Freudian theory, and even Lacan's work, is a kind of jealousy of/fascination with/anger toward the maternal -- specifically for the mother's ability to carry a child within her. To be two people at once. (comment 2) We can think about Lacan's mirror stage, and Freud's Oedipal stage and take a good hard look at what they are really saying about mothers, and by extension, about women. Theoretically, the mother is always close, always at hand, she is at home, rearing the child and so always accessible (and desired). The father is more distant, more ambiguously formed as a concept for the child. The father, then, is existing, but unsettled, loving but unsteady, a sort of ghost, a permanent apparition, a living oxymoron that slips away and yet remains. (comment 3)

But what of the woman? Part of it is the horror of her body, the rejection of her innards, and for both sons and daughters, the rejection of having been inside, part of the blood, the bowels, all the abject fluids of the mother. In a woman, this abjection is particularly pronounced, because she does not really separate from her mother, and forever identifies with her as a woman. It is no wonder there is a greater tendency to melancholia in women... (comment 4)