The Maternal Experience: Encounters with Ambivalence and Love

195 Pages·2020·3.996 MB·English

by  Margo Lowy

THE MATERNAL EXPERIENCE
The Maternal Experience explores the powerful and dynamic nature of maternal
ambivalence and disrupts the conventional narrative of the mother’s lived
experience by arguing that encounters with feelings of hatred are both universal
and have the capacity to stimulate and enrich maternal love.
T he book draws on the author’s personal mothering experiences, those of
other women, and examples from film to inspire new introspection about the
everyday maternal experience. Lowy takes a psychosocial approach to weave
thinking from selected psychoanalytic and contemporary accounts together
with personal stories to explore how maternal ambivalence operates and how
mothering is sourced in psychic struggles between loving and hating feelings in
an atmosphere that is rife with social and personal expectations and prohibitions.
By reworking the experience of maternal ambivalence, the book secures an
understanding of the mother’s feelings of hatred as a catalyst for her love and
allows these maligned and taboo emotions to be named and reframed into
acceptable and transformative feelings .
Brought alive by examples from film and first-hand experience, this book
is fascinating reading for academics and students of psychology, maternal and
women’s studies, and sociology, as well as practitioners in the fields of psychology,
social work, medicine and counselling.
Margo Lowy is a psychotherapist with an interest in mothering and women’s
reproductive health. She completed her doctorate and her research master’s at the
University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, investigating the fields of
maternal ambivalence and infertility.
Women and Psychology
Series Editor: Jane Ussher
Professor of Women‘s Health Psychology,
University of Western Sydney
This series brings together current theory and research on women and psychol-
ogy. Drawing on scholarship from a number of different areas of psychology,
it bridges the gap between abstract research and the reality of women’s lives by
integrating theory and practice, research and policy.
Each book addresses a ‘cutting edge’ issue of research, covering topics such as
postnatal depression and eating disorders, and addressing a wide range of theories
and methodologies.
The series provides accessible and concise accounts of key issues in the study
of women and psychology, and clearly demonstrates the centrality of psychology
debates within women’s studies or feminism.
Other titles in this series:
Bodies that Birth
R achelle Chadwick
Just Sex? 2nd edition
Nicola Gavey
Domestic Violence and Psychology
Paula Nicolson
Women, Sex, and Madness
Breanne Fahs
For more information about this series, please visit:
www.routledge.com/Women-and-Psychology/book-series/SE0263
THE MATERNAL
EXPERIENCE
Encounters with Ambivalence
and Love
Margo Lowy
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Margo Lowy
The right of Margo Lowy to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-22370-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-22374-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12434-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To my wise and imperfect father
who taught me the truth and power of contradiction .

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Preamble: the myth 1
1 Opening: lived experience, storytelling and maternal
ambivalence 3
2 What is maternal ambivalence? Conflict, contradiction,
confusion and the maternal ideal 17
3 History of thought on maternal ambivalence: locating
the mother’s voice amid patriarchy, taboos and feelings
of ambivalence 34
4 Donald Winnicott’s good-enough mother: transformation
through maternal love, failure, repair and moments
of hatred 52
5 Melanie Klein: there’s no love without hate—movement
between the rigid paranoid-schizoid and the integrated
depressive position 93
6 Wilfred R. Bion: learning from experience as a source
of maternal change, understanding and wisdom 127
viii Contents
7 Conclusions: the experience of maternal love and hate 160
B ibliography 166
I ndex 179
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank each woman who has shown the courage to reflect with me on
her mothering and who has received what I have had to say with humility, com-
passion, curiosity and a nod of understanding and still wanted to know more.
To those who couldn’t imagine or countenance my message, it inspired me to
question further. To others for whom this topic has given pause to think, you are
the daughter or the son of a mother, maybe the partner of a mother, or someone
who mothers, and I thank you.
I thank Jane Ussher for her feedback and for guiding me throughout this
process and for sharing my fascination with this topic. To Eleanor, Danielle and
Alex, thank you for being willing and available to answer my questions.
Annie, Annie, David, David, Hilary, Lara, Lisa, Lorraine, Nollaig and
Shterny, thank you for taking the time to read, contemplate and comment on
my book
I am forever grateful for my Australian support team—you know who you are.
To Jackie, who has shown me what mothering is. To mum, you are an inspira-
tion; to my devoted in-laws and siblings, you each enrich my life. To my children
and their partners, to my grandchildren, to my nephews and nieces, and to others
who spent many days in our home, I still learn from you all every day, and you
remind me to laugh. To my husband and my partner in parenting and in life,
David, we are in this together. I thank you for understanding the value of this
work for me and for humanity.