The expression of maternal hostility is always harmful to a child, but is it always unnatural or an indication of pathology? This intellectually stimulating webinar suggests there is a more historic and compassionate way to understand the hostile mother – one that moves the blame (and shame) from the individual pathology of the mother to the social and environmental factors that impact her.

The modern Western idealisation of mothers as instinctually loving can make it difficult to understand hostile mothers, who are typically perceived as being bad or perhaps even criminal. This presents problems for clinicians working with hostile and often shame-filled mothers. In contrast, clinicians who can make room for maternal hostility and shame, are better equipped to help mothers by allowing them to experience the full range of motherhood, including the energies of the Good Mother archetype and the Death Mother archetype. When these emotions are expressed in a safe therapeutic space they are less likely to be acted out.

A lack of understanding of maternal hostility also presents problems for mental health professionals and policy makers who are trying to prevent mothers from maltreating their children. Again, expanding the understanding of the range of emotions and behaviours naturally entailed by motherhood can help in the design of preventative programmes.

This course will offer a layered, compassionate and interdisciplinary understanding of hostile mothering. Although maternal hostility ranges from constant criticism to guilt-tripping to invalidation of the child’s emotions, this course will focus on the most extreme end of the maternal hostility – that of serious harm and infanticide.  If we can understand the apparently unfathomable end of this painful spectrum, then we are better equipped to understand maternal hostility in all of its less extreme forms.

Together Dr Sieff and Dr Laufer will bring the hostile mother out of the shadows, and help participants build a broader understanding of the emotional range of the mother.

Specifically, this seminar will discuss:

• The continuum of maternal emotions and behaviour bequeathed to us by evolution and how maternal emotions and behaviour have evolved to be sensitive to a mother’s environment
• How this evolved sensitivity to a mother’s environment may contribute to maternal hostility and how a lack of knowledge of evolutionary influences can create shame in struggling mothers
• How maternal shame increases the risk that mothers will act out their hostility
• How evolution has furnished humans not with a fully-fledged ‘maternal instinct’, but with a disposition to learn about mothering from what they observe and experience during childhood
• The construction of motherhood as an institution, including the symbols and expectations that make it dangerous for mothers
• The Jungian concept of an archetype, specifically the Good Mother archetype (ie the Virgin Mary) and the Bad or Death Mother (ie Medea)
• What role shame plays in the Hostile mother’s infanticidal experience
• Causes and correlations of infanticide, such as postpartum psychosis, race, and class
• The lived experience of infanticidal mothers; the context of their lives vs. their representation in society
• The prevention of maternal hostility as the expansion in the understanding of Motherhood

© nscience 2022 / 2023