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3. Mental Load: The Silent Symptom of Feminine Desire

Beyond the exhaustion of daily life, mental load reveals an unconscious pattern: the need to anticipate, to think for others, to meet everyone’s needs. Might it be a symptom? It often repeats a role assigned long ago, sometimes absorbed in childhood, caught between guilt and the desire to be loved.

In contemporary discourse, “mental load” refers to the invisible burden carried largely by women. It is the ongoing effort of planning, monitoring, remembering and worrying on behalf of others. Many describe it as a weight that never leaves the mind.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this phenomenon goes beyond domestic imbalance. Mental load can be read as a symptom, a compromise through which the unconscious finds expression indirectly. Like all symptoms, it carries a double meaning: it burdens the subject, yet it also reveals hidden desire.

This duality is central to understanding mental load. It appears alienating, yet it also carries an intimate truth. The feminine subject is not simply reduced to performing tasks or thinking for others; her unconscious has found in this position a meaningful place.

Freud reminds us that femininity is formed within a complex dialectic between one’s own desire and the desire of the Other. Seen through this lens, what we now call mental load can be understood as the manifestation of a feminine desire that shapes itself in relation to the Other.

Being a woman, in the psychoanalytic sense, is not defined by biology, social expectations or physical appearance. It is a matter of subjective position. Psychoanalyst Hélène Deutsch emphasized maternal engagement as one possible expression of femininity. Women may dedicate themselves to caring for others not merely out of social obligation but because it provides a path to personal and psychological fulfillment.

Mental load can manifest as a modern, secularized version of this dynamic. Even when working outside the home, contemporary women often continue to inhabit this extended maternal position. They identify with the role of anticipating, planning and providing constant presence and support. Yet this orientation carries risks: it can slide into self-effacement, leading to a form of silent sacrifice.

The point is clarified by Lacan’s discussion of the desire of the Other: femininity finds its place in caring for others, yet this care can become a trap. The subject believes she desires for herself, but she desires through the Other. Mental load thus becomes the space where this ambiguity takes shape, both an affirmed desire, to be indispensable, to be the one who thinks for others, and a form of alienation, losing oneself in the desire of the Other.

Freud had already observed that some hysterical symptoms were “silent,” lodged not in explicit language but in behaviors and repetitive acts. Mental load follows this logic: it is lived in silence. This discretion is significant. The symptom unfolds outside the stage of discourse. Hélène Deutsch, in describing the “as if” personality – women who appear perfectly adapted while feeling empty inside – showed that a woman can inhabit a space of apparent normality, but at the cost of subjective diminishment. Mental load can be one of these appearances of normality, where everything seems fine, at the expense of a quietly consuming silence.

Lacan might qualify this silence as belonging to the Real, that which eludes language and persists without being spoken. The woman who carries mental load does not always raise her voice. She endures and remains silent. This muteness is precisely the mark of the symptom: a truth expressed not through words but through action.

Lacanian psychoanalysis has opened an essential path for understanding the ambivalence of mental load. In Séminaire Encore, Lacan speaks of a feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, an “other” jouissance that cannot be reduced to language or the masculine symbolic order. This jouissance is infinite, boundless and sometimes approaches the mystical. Mental load could be one of its contemporary sites. To carry others constantly, to anticipate, to never rest—there is, in this boundlessness, a little-known intoxication. Many women testify to this paradox: they suffer under mental load, yet find it difficult to let go, because it also grants them a sense of place, intensity and substance.

Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, in Le féminin et la perversion, notes that this relationship to the feminine can slip into a perverse form of alienation: the woman becomes reduced to existing solely for the Other, losing her own subjectivity. Mental load then becomes a space where this risk plays out: the woman believes she exists through her role, yet she disappears as a subject.

This tension between jouissance and alienation lies at the heart of the symptom: it contains both power and loss of self. Femininity thus emerges as a dynamic between being at the service of the Other and seeking its own freedom.

But the symptom can be transformed through genuine speech. Analytic therapy does not remove the symptom, but it can shift and shed light on it. In the case of mental load, the challenge is to dare to articulate how much this burden carries the weight of self-loss. This transition from silence to speech is crucial, for mental load is precisely a silent symptom. Psychoanalysis provides a space for the symptom to be voiced, offering immediate relief.

Hélène Deutsch emphasized that maternal fulfillment can be a source of happiness, but only if it is recognized as one’s own desire, and not as a form of alienation. Analysis makes it possible to distinguish between what belongs to subjective desire and what belongs to the desire of the Other.

Chasseguet-Smirgel, in exploring the extremes of the feminine, highlights the danger of being engulfed: of becoming an object and losing oneself in sacrifice. Psychoanalytic listening helps to acknowledge this ambivalence, to recognize the pleasure in carrying the load and to refuse letting that pleasure turn into a form of servitude.

Finally, Lacan paves the way to a new subjectivation: to recognize in mental load an “other” jouissance, without losing oneself in it. Putting one’s desire into words lightens the burden. A woman can continue to inhabit this supportive role, if she chooses, as long as she does not reduce herself to it.

Mental load is not merely a domestic problem. It offers a path to the feminine unconscious, to its desire, to its jouissance and also to its potential for alienation.