A Mother, a Woman – Céline Aulit

The Ombilic adventure is coming to an end. With our long-awaited Congress just a few days away, the Ombilic team has two wonderfully teaching issues reserved for you for this week. Patricia B.-Caroz’s contribution, which you will find in this penultimate issue, focuses on the dignity restored to mothers by Lacanian psychoanalysis, making a distinction from the culpability inducing discourse that can on occasion befall them.

There is no doubt that every mother is marked by the woman within her. Whether she denies it or claims it, whether she passes it over in silence or lives it fully, this woman-part sneaks into each one. A text by J.-A. Miller, which was re-read at the occasion of the preparations of this Congress, is very clear on this subject: “The plugging function of the child makes us forget that it nonetheless divides, in the female subject who accedes to the maternal function, the mother and the woman”^[1]. Regarding this mother in the making, a lack of knowledge predominates since it is at the very moment when the woman becomes a mother that the cleavage between the two opens up. Her singular lack as a parlêtre as well as the object brought into play in this new adventure will signal the way in which she will tie her fate to that of this child. There are as many mothers as there are women. One by one.

Translation: Raphael Montague

Photography: ©Pascale Simonet – https://www.pascale-simonet.be/

Bibliography

“Thus, hypermodernity influences the signifiers of what a family was, as in every cultural domain, and reveals the fictional character of family and social bonds. Like capitalism, it has a function of creative destruction: it destroys tradition and makes a multitude of new forms and bonds proliferate, which are fragile since they are not consolidated over time. Norms, like laws, lack the time required to be complied with: they prove to be badly made and obsolete even before they are consolidated.”

Laurent E., “Protecting the child from the family delusion”, Psycho-analytical Notebooks, London, n°28, 2014, pp. 27-28.

^[1] J.-A. Miller, ‘The child and the object’, La petite girafe 18, p.7