intrigues

The relationships woven between parents and children are bound to pay tribute to their own past: the multitude of conscious and unconscious desires, crystallized as fantasies, is being reactivated once the baby arrives. As with every psychic event, the alchemy of the new set of identifications towards which the adult psychic is being led within the parenthood process will not be able to be either conflict free or ambivalence free. The Death drive and the Life drive are intertwining - always in unbalanced parts - and, although it may seem that one is taking over, the other one will never be fully defeated.
To illustrate the state of affair, I have chosen an example that belongs to the early interactions field. There, the cases in which a 'good' mother feels compelled to be a 'saint' are not rare. Beyond this commonplace, a deeper exploration of such a symptom will bring out various, yet unique configurations of the way in which a much deeper suffering, with much ampler effects on the child développment, can gain structure.
In his paper entitled 'Chronicles of fusion and defusion'¹, Denis Ribas works through a vast amount of knowledge in order to prove the great importance of the maternal function in baby's drive-integration process. Speaking of the mother 'that fuses', the writer introduces a quibble that is extremely eloquent for the investment's variations which a child has to endure from a mother who doesn't give up her feminine function: the mother that 'fuses-intrigues'.
However, the mother is 'intriguing' before 'fusing': 'being a result of adult sexual pleasure, the maternal function is its antipode', explained M. Fain (2001), when criticizing a much too chaste view on the maternal function and reminding the fact that, 'in ideal conditions, the primitive scene comes before the creation of a new individual, whom it simultaneously excludes'. The cyclic desire of resuming the primitive scene inevitably puts a pressure on the maternal function: this scene being often re-lived when the child is asleep, M. Fain saw the mother's act of rocking the baby to make him fall asleep as a paradigmatic example for the 'lover's censure' - the function of drive fusion which the mother performs and which helps the child to bear her absence, to withstand a temporary decathexis and, nevertheless, to gradually interiorise this protection barrier.
The early infantile clinical practice gives us many dramatic examples as a result of the 'good' mother's feeling compelled to be a 'saint'.
As a symptomatic situation, the case of Alina - aged 1 year and 5 months - is very frequent for the clinical practice in the field of early interactions. Beyond this commonplace, a deeper exploration of such symptoms will reveal diverse and at the same time unique outlines of ways in which sufferance can appear to be much deeper and have longer-term effects on the child's development.
Oana came to the first consultation with a punctuality that would become a general rule throughout the next sessions. Although Alina was walking quite well for her age, she was being carried by her mother, kept in a harness, looking much younger than she proved to be once plucking up courage in the consultation room and going towards the playground.
But this process took quite a long time - during the first half of our first consultation she glanced at me from time to time in a serious face yet interested, nonetheless refusing to leave the shelter built by her mother's arms and body. She made almost no sound during the consultation, except for the moments in which she whiningly asked for some water and, a bit later, when she protested at her mother's trying to keep her from taking things out of her bag. However, what I found to be more alarming was the fact that she wouldn't get near or touch the toys unless given by her mother. She seemed to be insecure of what she could do with them; she looked at them and then looked at Oana, willing to grasp her reaction but in the end she let them down and came back to Oana's lap. Oana tempted her with the toys, but very quickly, she herself began to apologize for not knowing how to play with the little girl... she could never think of anything!... On the other hand, she always seemed very careful in gathering all the things that Alina had been playing with, in cleaning, wiping the little girl if she got dirty or if she tumbled her outfit - then she would get moving automatically.
Regarding the fact that she's never torn herself away from her, well, this is their most important problem! 'I got tired!' - Oana suddenly and intensely burst out, with a mixture of exasperation doubled by culpability: 'I can't take it anymore, I can't endure... almost all the time I have to hold her in my arms, she always wants to stay with me and, moreover, she always wants the breast! Sometimes she's hungry, but most of the time she wants it just like that, to hold it in her mouth and play! And I can't take it anymore! I've tried everything, but if I don't offer it to her, she'll scream so loud, the whole neighbourhood can hear her... You might think I'm a bad, a monstrous mother because I feel that way, but I truly cannot take it anymore! Day or night, outside or inside - it doesn't matter: I have to give everything up and offer her the breast... I got tired... I don't sleep the nights because she wakes up every hour to have the breast.... I actually feel drained.... used and drained!'
Apparently, it all began with the 'feeding at request'... she wanted to do the best for her child and to give her EVERYTHING! So she left everything aside for the baby: fatigue, personal pleasures, career and all that meant her life before becoming a mother. And, to a certain extent, she was actually fulfilled with what she had achieved: Alina has grown up well, she is healthy and physically sturdy. But now Oana finds herself in a tight corner: she can't go on like that, but neither does she have the courage to stop Alina's breastfeeding. What can she do?
While in her head, Oana was restlessly - day after day and hour after hour - hitting against this question as a brick wall, in my head, as I was listening to her, the question was already transformed, into more: what were the grounds of this situation, dominated by such a drastic alternation of inhibition and excitation?...and why such a traumatically-looking excitation?... what made this woman to compulsively offer her breast to the child? And where was the father in this entire picture? What mandate, what function does the child have in this family system?
The passing of time - which was very hard to bear for Oana from an emotional point of view from one meeting to another, judging by the frequency of calls between sessions, when she would desperately call me about different happenings with the child, and also by the overwhelmingly overcast climate during the meetings - will provide answers to many of these questions.
She was married for several years, but Alina came in a paradoxical moment: the couple had financially reached a level where they could afford raising and caring for a child, but the feelings between the two spouses had become colder and colder, transforming into some kind of fight. However, the project of having a baby was a common decision. Then, before knowing that she was pregnant, it happened that Oana got ill and took an antibiotics treatment. She couldn't bear to have an abortion- the way her gynecologist first advised her and the way her mother also insisted to do - so she spent her whole pregnancy period in a state of doubt and fear. Her own childhood memories also contributed to the magnitude of her ambivalence towards the pregnancy.
Oana was the only living child in her mother's 4 pregnancies. Her mother had lost two pregnancies which she bore until the last trimester and the fourth child had been born with a disease that led to its death shortly after its birth. She didn't know much about these events - her parents had never spoken to her about these babies although she 'somehow knew' every time her mother had been pregnant. Even while Oana was pregnant her mother hadn't told her anything but: 'What, do you want to have the same fate as I had, to give birth to a dead or handicapped child?'... 'The times were different then... the echography didn't exist, medicine was far behind nowadays technology', Oana explained to me, trying to excuse her mother and empathize with the suffering that she hinted her mother had endured.
Still, the imperative way in which these memories came to present when she herself was preparing to become a mother stood for the important role they had had in her childhood structuring. In the sphere of object–relationships, the sessions will gradually outline the overcompensatory and reparatory role of the little girl's feeding related to her infanticide fantasies, fed by her parents' silence regarding the miscarriages. In close connection with these fantasies, two things became obvious: the self-punishing function and the masochistic benefits that soon transformed Oana into a 'quantity slave' - when she offered her breast to her child not because she found pleasure and satisfaction through this experience for both of them, but rather 'beyond the pleasure principle' - leading them to an addictive way of functioning, in which breastfeeding is a 'self-calming method' (G.Szwec, 1993) for Oana and a 'neo-need' (J.McDougall, 1978) for Alina.
Alina's frequent night awakenings and her going back to sleep only by her mother's breast prove her incapacity to hallucinate in her dream the desire, the satisfaction that her mother's breast can bring. Alina's sleep has maintained its characteristics since the beginning of her life, when it was the physiological result of the satiety following breastfeeding, thus without evolving 'from physiological soothing to libidinal relief' s Spitz used to say. In Alina and Oana's case, the maternal breast is doomed to remain the 'sleep guardian' - a place which it should have gradually given in to the dream and to the rhythms created by the sleep-wakefulness alternation, thus favoring the development of the representations needed to make the mother's absence bearable. Still, how could Oana have constructed a natural alternation presence-absence when any des-investing had profoundly traumatic meanings for her, automatically evoking the babies' loss and the periods of mourning and of isolation lived beside her mother, during childhood? Certainly, she couldn't do this but in an aggressive manner: exasperated, she tries, from time to time, to escape this infernal cycle by leaving Alina to cry for her, alone in the room, refusing any physical contact. When she cannot take it any longer to hear the child crying, she 'gives up', goes to her and makes her go to sleep by angrily rocking the crib. Thus, their 'too close' relationship suddenly becomes a 'too far away' one, doing nothing but exchange one operational method with another. Still, being aware of these interventions' traumatic effect on Alina, she didn't apply them too often. When possible, she asks her husband to take her place and to take care of the baby - a task that he has very often succeeded in achieving.
We are thus moving towards the point in which we will be able to identify which is the place of the paternal figure in this context. Most often, it seems to be with no distinct shape and without any firmness, altered in its role and functions - which should have been a separating one and at the same time, a binder within the oedipal triangulating circuit.
Victim of the primary object splitting, the father succeeds in being accepted only as a breast substitute - being thus a part object, impregnated by the pregenital way of functioning, in which ambivalence takes extreme dimensions. Sometimes, Oana seems close to divorce, but culpability and especially the dread of the emptiness that would appear in her life, if he disappeared, instantly stops her; however, other times, she can hardly keep herself from physically hurting him. Tenderness... it's only in the (idealized) memories of the early times.
Thus decrypted, the symptomatic interaction sequences (B. Cramer an F. Palacio - Epasa, 1993), identified in the interaction of Oana and Alina, points out the active - though profoundly unconscious - manner of trans-generational transmission of traumas which have left a strong impression on a child's 'life tree'. Stated as early as the first meetings, Alina's 'mandate' was that of becoming another 'ego', another version of Oana, one capable of being happy and fulfilled first by her parents and, later on, in life. But this adhesive collage with the girl, the result of the 'dead mother complex' so active in Oana's psychic (A.Green, 1983), materialized in the compulsion of offering the breast and of merging with her, inevitably brought the defusing mark of her own traumatic past. The tendency of over-fusing at the child's level - over-compensating for her own grief - eventually proves to be the perfect manner to become defusing or un-fusing for the child.
My intention was thus to portray the extremely complex work which the woman's psychic has to carry on in the process of motherhood, involving all the levels of her past development. This work results in a polyphony with structuring valences for the register of a child's investing by his mother. We can thus notice a narcissistic cathexis of the child - vital for its survival- as Freud noted in 'To Introduce Narcissism' (1914); an auto-erotic cathexis, given the fact that the baby is still regarded as a part of the mother's body; an erotic cathexis, the baby being regarded as an object for the purposeinhibited sexual drive and thus giving rise to the tenderness towards the child; a masochistic cathexis, identified in the pleasure of allowing herself to be devoured and used (in the meaning presented by Winnicott); and finally, a sadistic cathexis, identifiable in her hatred manifestations.
In order to 'moderate' - in the musical sense - this polyphony, the mother has to succeed in remaining 'intriguing' for the child, that is to leave for the woman she is the necessary space, so that she can again find the desire for her partner, thus creating an opening for the child towards the mystery of the third person, towards triangulation, towards Eros and towards life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braunschweig, D., Fain, M. (1975) : La nuit et le jour, Paris, PUF. Cramer, B., & Palacio-Espasa F. (1993) : La pratique de psychothérapies mères-bébé, Paris, PUF.
Fain, M. (2001): La function maternelle selon P. Marty, Revue Française de Psychosomatique, vol. 20, p. 48, Paris, PUF.
Freud, S. (1914): 'To Introduce Narcissism' in S.E., vol.XIV, London, Hogarth Press.
Green, A. (1983): La mère morte, in Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort, Paris, Minuit.
McDougall, J. (1978): Plaidoyer pour une certaine anormalité, Paris, Gallimard.
Ribas, D. (2002): Chroniques de l'intrication et de la désintrication pulsionnelle, in R.F.P. vol. XVI, no.5, Special Congres, Paris, PUF, p. 1698-1786.
Spitz, R. A., Brody, S. (1956): Patterns of Mothering: Maternal Influence During Infancy,New York, International Universities Press.
Szwec, G. (1999): La fonction maternelle du thérapeute, la mère morte, l'amante, Revue Française de Psychosomatique, vol. 16, p. 7-18, Paris, PUF.
Szwec, G. (1993): Les procédées auto-calmants, Revue Française de Psychosomatique, vol. 7, Paris, PUF.
Winnicott, D.W. (1969): The use of an object, Int. J. Psychoanal., vol. 50, p. 711-716.

[1]Presented at the Congress of French Language Psychoanalysts in 2002, in Brussels.