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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking quote to reveal its depth and richness. These lapidary, often provocative, formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
“Maternal instinct is a myth. It doesn’t exist.”
This quote is taken from the book by philosopher Elisabeth Badinter, published in 1980, titled L’Amour en plus, in which she challenges the notion of instinct as an innate and universal phenomenon. To assert the existence of a maternal instinct is to say that all women, without exception, have an inherited predisposition that compels them to want children and to know how to care for them, regardless of their personal or family history. They would thus be predestined for the maternal role. Understood in this way, the maternal instinct would be an invariant passed down from through generations to the entire human species.
However, by studying the evolution of the maternal role throughout history, she demonstrates that it is neither a constant nor a universal given shared by all women.
Badinter’s thesis resonates deeply with psychoanalytic theories that have studied the maternal process and uncovered its complexity. No study or research to date has been able to demonstrate the existence of a genetic or even hormonal factor that would establish the existence of an instinct in humans or show a clear difference between men and women in terms of the parent-child relationship. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to speak of a maternal as well as a paternal feeling.
As early as 1949, the psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache, in L’unité de la psychologie, demonstrated that instinct exists in animals but is not present in humans, establishing, before Badinter, the inconsistency of human behavior over the centuries as well as its individual differentiation based on each person’s subjectivity and their reactions to their socio-familial environment. For him, a subject is by no means imprisoned by an instinct, that is, by a genetic program characteristic of a given species. Similarly, the psychologist Henri Wallon affirms that of all animal species, the human baby is the most deprived and vulnerable at birth.
With Badinter, psychoanalysis proposes to speak, instead of instinct, of maternal feeling, which is the love a mother can feel for her child. However, this feeling is fluctuating, contingent and not programmed: some mothers feel it strongly, some more weakly and others not at all, with the latter being condemned to judgment and reproach from their environment.
Maternal love, like all human love, is a dynamic and complex construction. Its emergence depends heavily on a set of unconscious, historical, emotional, relational, biological, sociocultural factors, etc. It is a shaped, random and variable feeling, not depending on a fixed, preprogrammed and automatic instinct. A woman’s experience with her child is therefore always unique, similar in some points to others but also different from all other mothers. It is the product of her personal and family history as well as the social, economic and political context of her time.
Maternal feeling is built from the earliest interactions between a mother and her child.
First, through the infant’s identification with its first love object. This identification plays a key role in the development of future maternal feeling, which will be strongly affected by it.
It then forms in the primary mother-child relationship, which D. Winnicott calls “primary maternal preoccupation.” This is a particular psychic state of the mother in the first three or four months after birth. The mother finds herself in a state of psycho-affective fusion with her child, developing great sensitivity to its desires and needs. This maternal availability is essential for establishing a confident and secure attachment. Sometimes, the mother may be overwhelmed by anxieties, depression or traumatic experiences from her own childhood. In such cases, she will have difficulty entering this state of maternal preoccupation and responding adequately to her baby’s signals.
Maternal feeling is also constructed through the mother’s investment in the child, stemming from the desire for a child different from oneself, the fruit of shared and authentic love. This investment is crucial for the future mother-child relationship.
It is also important to note, as we did in our last article, that love is always an ambivalent feeling, including maternal love. It is always paired with hatred. Paradoxically, this ambivalence is constitutive of human affective development, even part of the maturation process of maternal feeling. This is what Winnicott highlighted with the notion of the “good enough mother.” The maternal role does not imply sacrifice or perfection. The mother who is good enough is the one who does her best to respond to her child’s needs, desires and interactions in an appropriate, receptive, reassuring and sensitive manner most of the time. Conversely, an absent, depressed, traumatized or inconsistent mother will tend to generate in the child an anxious, disorganized and insecure psychic state, with detrimental repercussions on its affective and relational development as well as on the future maternal or paternal feelings.
It is true that, to some extent, psychoanalysis itself has contributed to the belief in the existence of an instinct. This stems from a confusion in the translation of the word “trieb” used by Freud to designate a direction of human behavior. It was translated, in the first French editions, by the term instinct, whereas it is now replaced by the notion of drive, indicating the existence in every human being of an irresistible urge, an energetic force that can be biological (as in sexual drive) or acquired (as in a drive for violence).
The notion of maternal instinct created confusion in different cultural contexts, with the idea that it is enough to get married and have children for this instinct to be automatically triggered. We know today, particularly with Françoise Dolto, that one is not born a mother or a father, but one becomes one. The psychoanalyst often repeated that “it is the child who makes the parent” and not the other way around! She meant that parents are formed and developed, if they aspire to it, in response to their child, who, through their desires, needs and unique personality, shapes the role and identity of the parents. She often added that one remains an apprentice parent throughout life. Parenthood is indeed a continuous learning process.
To conclude, I highly recommend reading Lili Sohn’s comic book titled Mamas, petit précis de déconstruction de l’instinct maternel, a work of great humor, sensitivity and intelligence.