While only the angelic aspects of mother are revered and perpetuated through not only religion but also media, literature and capitalist structures; the darker, more visceral experiences of motherhood including abortion, adoption, neglect, abuse and abandonment are either ignored or sensationalized. When these do make news, they do nothing more than to perpetuate the stereotype of the bad/dark mother. Very rarely do we read or hear or watch the life story behind the very difficult choices these mothers made. However, as therapists, we see and work with experiences of the dark mother perhaps more than any other segment of society.

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy points out that in every culture there is evidence of mothers dis-investing from certain infants, due to economics, warfare, gender preference, social mores, or the conviction that a child is too weak to survive, often allowing them to die by neglect as opposed to infanticide. This more passive option of ‘letting go’ at times leads to death, at times leads to a healthier environment for that child, and at times to a more brutal one, but often the mother’s action comes from an animalistic instinct toward survival and preservation of the greater family unit.

However, these practices – enactments of maternal finitude – all devastate the mother-child line. The emotions, energies, motivations and context of each woman who voluntarily abandons, aborts or puts up her child for adoption – as altruistic as her motive may be – lead to psychological infanticide and infanticidal attachment for the child. It is important to note that the personal experience for a mother and child caught in this expression is deeply distressing and profoundly influences their mental health and capacity to engage in life.

Women who relinquish infants for adoption experience a specific and extreme type of grief. Although the process of adoption has become more humane, the mourning and the trauma of it does not abate. Studies of mothers who have given a child up for adoption are sparse, but there have been enough reports of similar experiences that they have been given the name, birthmother syndrome: a combination of PTSD symptoms, unresolved grief, decreased self-esteem, perfectionism masking shame, impaired emotional development, self-punishment, “unexplained secondary infertility,” and “living … various extremes” (Henney et al., 2007: 876).

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, adoption is often considered a murder of the merger between the biological mother and infant in the first year of life. Although the adoptive mother may be a safer option than the birth mother, the child may experience the separation as psychological infanticide. In his article “Infanticidal Attachment,” Kahr noted that psychological infanticide manifests as a relational style adjacent to disorganized attachment. He found the harm is created at a very early stage of life, when the mother is severing her bond with the infant, who has not yet organized experience into a coherent identity. 

When unable to form an emotional bond with caretakers, the child’s terror may express as violence, depression, psychosis, reactive attachment disorder, or in the high rates of murder and suicide among adoptees (Brodzinsky 1990). Such symptoms are both protection from a world perceived as annihilating and a desperate attempt to communicate the inner experience of being held hostage by internalized murderers.

For us as therapists and counsellors, this is important knowledge for working with mothers and children, especially in cases of adoption or difficult mother relationships. These versions of motherhood typically don’t have a place to be discussed due to the persecution of the ‘bad mother’. Often, they are only brought to the therapy office, especially when the therapist is a woman. This often provides the only safe harbour known to women grappling these painful experiences. In the webinar, we will learn how to create these safe harbours for women so they can share the experiences of their loss without guilt or shame, grieve, and heal.

The safe harbor of a feminine healing sanctuary, woman to woman, allows us to explore our mother complex (Evangeline Rand, Recovering Feminine Spirituality, 2016)

Women who abort a foetus or relinquish a child experience a deeply emotional disturbing event with mental health consequences. There are circumstances in which a loving mother may experience the arrival of a baby as a profound disaster; this is one of the truths that underlie but is rarely spoken out loud in the politics of abortion. We have few models or ways of understanding this paradox of emotion. One is the Great Mother, as identified by Jungian theorists such as Erich Neumann, as the authentic representation of mother, she who both gives and takes life.  The Great Mother has both the instinct to create and nurture life, but also the capacity to destroy and devour life. These destructive and deadly drives are necessary instinctual acts – often the efforts of a mother to paradoxically preserve life. As Jung says, echoing the thoughts of thousands of mothers, “How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.” As therapists, we can learn to expand our understanding of the darkened experiences of motherhood beyond a binary of good or bad, which can allow a woman to metabolize, find acceptance, grieve and recover.

Together Dr Sherwood and Dr Laufer will illuminate the impossible situations of abortion, abandonment and adoption as natural instinctual aspects of the Great Mother that may be experienced as devastating personal events but necessary for the maintenance of life. They will help to create containers for participants and therapists to hold the experiences of maternal and child loss.

Specifically, this seminar will discuss:

• A brief overview of the Mother archetype in Jungian terms, including the Great Mother, the Good Mother and the Bad Mother
• A sociopolitical history of the representation and expectation of Mother, as she is split into Good and Bad
• A brief anthropological context of abortion, abandonment and adoption
• The current state of mothers making impossible choices that break the mother-child line
• The effect on children when mothers break the mother-child line, such as psychological infanticide and infanticidal attachment and therefore their own capacity for parenting
• An understanding of the way these events can be understood in the context of the Great Mother
• The myths of Medusa and Medea as a way of understanding and containing the destructive mother and the destroyed child
• A way of making space for and containing these emotion laden destructive maternal events in therapy

Learning Objectives:

• Explain the Mother archetype in Jungian terms, including the Great Mother, the Good Mother and the Bad Mother
• Explain the anthropological context of abortion, abandonment and adoption
• Discuss the effect on children when mothers break the mother-child line, such as psychological infanticide and infanticidal attachment and therefore their own capacity for parenting

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