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Deadmother Sexualdevelopment

The paper discusses the concept of the "dead mother syndrome" proposed by Andree Green regarding the psychic effects on a child of the psychic loss of the mother. When the mother becomes depressed and emotionally unavailable, the child internalizes her as a "dead mother" who is psychically unavailable. This can obstruct the child's ability to develop representations during the pre-Oedipal phase and conceptualize the primal scene. It can also result in pathological imagos of the mother and experiencing her absence as a psychic hole rather than a destroyed object. Individuals with this syndrome typically develop compulsive thinking as a coping mechanism, and have difficulty with intimate relationships and experiencing pleasure.

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Ciprian Cătălin Alexandru
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91 views

Deadmother Sexualdevelopment

The paper discusses the concept of the "dead mother syndrome" proposed by Andree Green regarding the psychic effects on a child of the psychic loss of the mother. When the mother becomes depressed and emotionally unavailable, the child internalizes her as a "dead mother" who is psychically unavailable. This can obstruct the child's ability to develop representations during the pre-Oedipal phase and conceptualize the primal scene. It can also result in pathological imagos of the mother and experiencing her absence as a psychic hole rather than a destroyed object. Individuals with this syndrome typically develop compulsive thinking as a coping mechanism, and have difficulty with intimate relationships and experiencing pleasure.

Uploaded by

Ciprian Cătălin Alexandru
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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International Conference on Classical Psychoanalysis

26, 27, 28 April 2013


Athens
`Sexuality and Perversions`

Title of Paper
The dead mother syndrome and it affects the individual`s sexual development

Summary by Minopoulou Olga

Andree Green`s paper `The dead mother` which was included as a chapter in the book `Life Narcissism death
narcissism` (1983) lent the title to this paper. The current work is an attempt of approaching the psychical effects
that appears to have the psychical loss of the mother by her child. Using Green`s exact words `the dead mother is a
concept that refers to an imago which has been constituted in the child`s mind, following maternal depression,
brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child, into a distant figure, toneless,
practically inanimate, … [The] dead mother…is a mother who remains alive but who is, so to speak, psychically dead
in the eye of the young child in her care.` Green believes that the main disadvantage of these patients is their
inability during the pre-oedipal phase to constitute the third dimension. This becomes an obstacle for the
representation of the primal scene in their phantasy. Green supports that during the primal dual relationship the role
of the father is engraved as a figure of absence that intermediates in the dual relationship by splitting it, without
being at the same time a libidinaly invested object. This results to the creation of pathological imagos of the mother.
The mother as an object of decathexis is experienced as an absence that is not representable by the child. Is an act
of murder but the primary object is killed without hatred. Instead of a destroyed object there is a psychic
hole.`Above all the quest for lost meaning structures the early development of the fantasmatic and the intellectual
capacities of the ego.`Nevertheless, the child has to survive and live a life devoid of all meaning. Usually these
patients develop a compulsion to think which works as a `patched breast`. Sublimation may be obtained but he/she
remains extremely vulnerable to one aspect and that is his/her`s love life. The identification with the emptiness the
decathexis left behind and not the identification with the object itself, appears every time a new object appears in
order to occupy this empty space. Love for this object is not possible. Solitude then is actively sought because it
offers the illusion that the dead mother has left him/her alone. All these minimize any chance these patients may
have to experience any kind of pleasure.

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