The Dead Mother

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.