2 - Psychoanalytic cannibalism

Summary

There is no getting round the fact that each man and woman came out of a woman. Attempts are made to get out of this awkward predicament. There is the whole subject of couvade, and in the original harlequin myth there is a man who gives birth to babies. And the idea of being born out of the head is often found, and it is certainly easy to jump from the word “conception” to the concept of “conceiving of.”

D. W. Winnicott

As the site of each individual's physical and psychological origin, the mother is necessarily central to the analysis of infancy, development, and trauma. Paradoxically, however, the mother is most often represented within the conventions of Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of disappearance. In order for human development to occur in an orderly fashion, the infant's primal cathexis onto the mother must be ruptured, and the mother replaced by alternative physical, psychological, and erotic objects. When the mother appears in psychoanalysis, then, she is destined to disappear; she is the original object of desire and of prohibition, the site of both origins and loss.

This chapter aims to elucidate the theoretical underpinnings of my larger analysis of dead and missing mothers in the Victorian novel. At the same time, however, I remain concerned with the extent to which psychoanalytic theories duplicate the narrative paradigms of Victorian fiction, a fact that is both clarified and problematized in post-Freudian revisions of psychoanalytic developmental models, particularly in the predominant field of British psychoanalysis, object-relations theory.