Passionate Inferno: Mother-Child Love and Hate

When Freud started looking closely at family life, he saw its dark underside: competition, anger, jealousy, hatred, and the desire to kill. Children want to kill parents, and sometimes do. Alternatively, parents want to kill their children, and sometimes do.

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It is true that men murder much more often than women, but when a woman causes the death of another, that person is most likely to be her own newborn baby. As Sarah Hrdy documents in Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000), the notion of an inborn and natural maternal instinct is more myth than fact. Mother love is conditional and dependent on a variety of factors. An unvarnished reading of the historical record reveals indifference and even cruelty toward not only other people’s children but their own as well.

For mothers, the contradictory needs between mother and infant, mothering and survival, mothering and the desire to be attractive for males, mothering and work are all factors that make mothering a complex, contradictory endeavor. At these times, mothering can become more burdensome than blissful. Infanticide is one way throughout history that women—especially those without access to birth control or abortion—have terminated their investment in offspring when mothers felt that conditions weren’t favorable for motherhood. There is a village in Bolivia where, during a period of war and economic stress in the 1930s, nearly every woman killed her newborn. In one village in Papua New Guinea, 41 percent of all live infants born between 1974 and 1978 were killed by their parents just after birth. In 1978, the number of abandoned children in Brazil was estimated at 15 million.

What can be more traumatic than biological separation is the breaking of the narcissistic bond, or the sense of symbiotic oneness and the once-in-a-lifetime union, that exists between mother and infant as well as between mother and fetus. As a mother, I have been thinking and feeling a lot about the process of separation.

When my daughter Molly was four years old, I was taking a nature walk with her, something we like to do together. The area around our country home was buzzing with the song of the 17-year cicadas, which come in massive numbers only once every 17 years to live long enough to make their strange ethereal music before they drop their eggs from a tree.

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As we were walking through the woods, we came across a cicada in the last, waning period of life. He, though I do not really know how to distinguish gender in these insects, allowed us to pick him up by his wings, place him on a tree, and then take him off. He sat in our hands and walked on our arms. We spent 20 minutes with this cicada. We even named him, and Molly decided she wanted to take him home with her. We set him in Molly’s carriage, perched in the empty seat like he was a king, and started to walk home. Suddenly Molly reached for him, took him out of the carriage, put him on the ground, and proceeded to stomp on him.

For just a little while, Molly seemed to love this little cicada. For that moment, Molly embraced love, life, and togetherness. Then Molly had had enough of that little cicada; she was ready to be done with him. In that moment of stomping, she embraced hate, death, and separation. In her acts of love and subsequent murder, she embodied some basic principles about love and aggression, attachment and separation; you don’t have one without the other. They go together as surely as the proverbial horse and carriage. Also, they are usually directed to the same object; you don’t necessarily love one person and hate another; you hate most of all the ones you love most of all. You don’t want to leave someone unless you also want to be close; the people you most ardently want distance from are the same people you want to possess.

In this age of violence, terrorism, death, and destruction, is there an antidote for our predilection for destruction? Yes—we can learn to do better. Learning is what human beings uniquely do rather well.

It is a startling concept: We have to learn to love. To learn to love—by which I mean learn to be loving—is an active verb, an act. The time when it is easiest, fastest, and smoothest to learn is, of course, when we are children. We need these lessons to be authentic and real, not some sanitized, idealized version of love that none of us can live up to and that none of us will be able to sustain over time.

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We need to learn that hate is not a “four-letter word.” For children to learn to love, they need to learn that they hate and that they, too, are hated. Children are hate-able precisely because they themselves hate. The parents who does not permit themselves to hate a child are refusing to respond to the real person that the child is. In such an atmosphere of denial, the children will never have the feeling that they is known, accepted, and fully loved for who they is.

Healthy psychological growth is fostered by parents helping their children to recognize and feel their destructive wishes and, at the same time, to refrain from acting on them. Constructive hate—hating without destructive action—is the same thing as love and will allow the child to be hated and to hate without being frightened of the consequences.

Psychoanalysis is a ritual of telling one’s story. In telling the patient to say what comes to his or her mind, psychoanalysts are suggesting the silencing of the normal operations of our everyday conversational speech. When we do this, another language presents itself to us, the language of the unconscious, or our inner speech. This speech that connects us with our deepest being.

I think of the process of being analyzed as a “growing down” to the origins. In order to give up the compulsion to repeat the past, you have to grow down into that past and return to it, defenseless and open. You must return to that psychic place where the pain began, and allow yourself to re-experience it.

The job of the analyst, then, is to return the patient to that period of time before defenses were erected—before there was tightness in the chest instead of a raging anger, before there was numbness instead of unbearable hurt. This is the time when feelings are still raw, unfiltered, conflicting, and irrational. All this is the natural state of the child, but becomes the unconscious of the adult.

When analysis is done properly, this growing down is done quite artfully, as a guided tour. This excursion into one’s in-

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ternal landscape is quite a different matter than when one stays grown down because one simply cannot grow up. The former has maturity as its goal, and is organized and freeing; the latter is chaotic and constricting. It is the analyst’s job to make sure that this delicate, even dangerous, growing down heals rather than harms.

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