Concept
Dead mother complex
André Green's name, from a 1980 lecture published in 1983, for the lasting effect on a child of a mother who stays alive and present but becomes psychically absent, withdrawn into a depression, often after a loss of her own. Losing her living presence, the child withdraws its investment from her and identifies unconsciously with the 'dead' mother, which leaves a cold, empty core that shows later as an inability to love, to take pleasure and to invest new objects, beneath a life that may look ordinary.
Development
Undated
introduced by André Green
Green set out the dead mother complex in his essay « La mère morte », collected in Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort (1983): the child's inner world is organised around a mother who, though alive, has withdrawn her investment, usually through depression or mourning.
In The Dead Mother (1983);Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (1983)
Relations
- introduced by André Green
Green set out the dead mother complex in his essay « La mère morte », collected in Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort (1983): the child's inner world is organised around a mother who, though alive, has withdrawn her investment, usually through depression or mourning.
Works
- 1983
André Green's essay on the dead mother complex, first given as a lecture to the Société psychanalytique de Paris in 1980 and published in 1983 as the last chapter of Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort. The dead mother is not a mother who has died. She stays alive and present but becomes psychically absent, sunk in depression, often after a loss of her own, and withdraws her investment from the child. The child withdraws its investment from her in turn and identifies unconsciously with the 'dead' mother, which leaves a cold, empty core beneath a later life that may look ordinary. Green presents the complex as something discovered in the transference: it may be invisible when an analysis begins, and it appears as a depression in the transference, the repetition of an infantile depression that often cannot be remembered. The essay appeared in English as 'The Dead Mother' in On Private Madness (1986), and in Hebrew as a separate book.
- 1983
Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism
A collection of André Green's essays on narcissism, some previously unpublished, by an author who had worked on the subject since 1963. Freud introduced narcissism in 1914 and let it recede after the revisions of around 1920: the opposition of life and death drives, the second topography and a new theory of anxiety. Green ties narcissism to that last drive theory. Beside the positive narcissism of the life drives, which seeks the unity of the ego, he postulates a death narcissism, which he calls negative narcissism, aiming at the ego's abolition in an aspiration towards zero. A first part treats the theory of narcissism (the same, the other and the neutral; primary narcissism as structure or state; anxiety), a second describes clinical forms (moral narcissism, the neutral gender, the dead mother), and a postface on the ego as mortal and immortal ends on the figure of a Janus-faced Narcissus. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1983, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (2001).
See also
People
References
- The Dead Mother1983Evidence for a relation
- Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism1983Evidence for a relation