Is the perfect mother a perfect wife? Is the perfect mother, in every case, the result of mental perfection and ethical superiority? Or is there a hidden strife between love and motherhood? Is mother love always the enchanting image presented to us by poets and intimidated sons? Or is it an alloy of higher qualities, biological necessity and egotistical neurotic cravings? I do not intend to settle all those problems within the limits of a short chapter, but rather to point out some of the morbid components of mother love which a psychoanalyst detects in his women patients, and which, exaggerated in the neurotic, exist to a slight degree in every woman.
Sex Cravings and Motherhood Cravings are so closely related that few psychologists have ever dreamt of dissociating them for the purpose of study. The average moralist, who prefers cheap popularity to scientific accuracy, excuses the exis[Pg 242]tence of sex cravings only on one condition, that they become absolutely subservient to motherhood cravings.
The birth control agitation which is making such rapid headway at the present day, on the other hand, means, in part, that while motherhood may be the consequence of unregulated sex activities, it is not, for all women, their conscious motive.
Why is it that some women with an erotic disposition and a voluptuous physique, fear pregnancy while other women, apparently indifferent to men, crave motherhood?
Physiology does not give us a very satisfactory answer to this question. Endocrinologists tell us that sex cravings are determined by the ovaries and motherhood cravings by the posterior part of the pituitary gland, but this leaves us exactly where we were when we started out.
Pregnancy and Health. All physiologists will agree with the statement that in a normal, complex free woman, a type which unfortunately, the complexity of our civilization does not allow us to behold very frequently, pregnancy is accompanied by an unusual activity of all the organism, imparting to the female a sense of great power and, consequently, of well-being, mental and physical. The[Pg 243] adrenals work at high pressure to produce the muscular tone necessary in gestation. The thyroid is called upon to transform more and more of the electric current produced by the brain cells. New glands of a temporary nature develop in the woman's body, regulating her life functions more accurately and imparting to her a feeling of dreamy happiness and relaxation.
After delivery, another part of her body enters into activity, her mammary glands, so closely related to the genitals that any stimulation of either region finds a strong echo in the other. Many are the women in whom lactation produces intensely erotic feelings affording them at times full gratification.
Fear of Pregnancy. Unfortunately, civilisation has surrounded motherhood with so many complications, social, ethical, financial, sentimental, etc., that in very few women, indeed, is that biological process an unmixed pleasure, dissociated from all pain and anxiety.
Vomiting, which expresses the female's disgust for her condition, or her mate or the offspring; cramplike tensions, expressing her worries about her appearance, her anxious thought of financial or social consequences; anxiety states, affecting the ad[Pg 244]renals, which discolor her face (pregnancy mask), make pregnancy hideous in many cases.
Even the process of parturition seems to have become more painful and dangerous with advancing civilisation.
Any one who has seen, for instance, Mexican women barely interrupting their labor in the fields to give birth to a child, and resuming their tasks an hour later, must realise that autosuggestion has much to do with the physical disability of the civilised woman in child bed.
In spite of the complexities of modern life, the female organism which is not affected by fear complexes, must expect a pleasure premium from pregnancy, lactation and other duties of motherhood. This would supply us with an organic basis for the mother's attachment to her offspring which is observable almost in every animal species.
That a number of women may be found who hate their children owing to the suffering to which unwelcome motherhood and difficult parturition have subjected them, is easily understandable. In fact we face a vicious circle. The unwelcome pregnancy will be an unpleasant one, followed almost unavoidably by painful delivery, etc.
When Mother Love is Lacking or when a[Pg 245] mother hates a very young child, the psychologist must look for morbid unconscious influences which analysis should remove as soon as possible.
Stekel, the Viennese analyst, tells of a woman who was very fond of three of her daughters but, for some mysterious reason, detested the fourth one. Analysis revealed that she imagined she saw every one of her husband's faults reproduced and magnified in the unfortunate child.
She also imagined that she loved her husband very deeply.
The year when the unloved child was conceived, however, she had fallen in love with another man, a young poet. She remained "technically faithful" to her husband, altho, when in his arms, it was always the poet to whom she was giving herself.
She hoped sentimentally that the forthcoming child would look like her platonic lover but the little girl reproduced with striking faithfulness her father's features.
Unwilling to accept her dislike of her husband, the romantic mother had transferred i............