“Dialogue with her mother lasts all life”

Why an essay on the link to the mother? It seems far from philosophy …

This book is part of my philosophical work. After a first book devoted to conflicting interactions, a second on those, constructive, around teaching, I attached myself to the interactions in which benevolence and conflict coexist. At the height of these, there is one like any other: the relationship with the mother. Because, from mother, we only have one, with which we have for a time constituted a single person, to the stadium of the mirror*, where the child understands that he is different from his mother. Our mother opens us to otherness and accompanies the metamorphoses of existence, from baby to old age. This relationship leads us far, very far, in our intimacy. It is marked by a great ambivalence, there is an incomparable love but also of rejection and a form, sometimes saving, sometimes destructive, of hatred.

You talk about “little mom”. For what ?

I call the mother “little mom”, first because she is a small human – by her size, her minimal lifespan compared to the history of earth, on the scale of the universe. She is very small then compared to the maternal tasks she has to fulfill: this is why the father, the family, the village are called upon to share the maternal functions. There is no perfect mother, but as the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said, the child needs a faulty mother. Because in these flaws, these gaps, he will build himself and self -manner – when it comes to mistreating mother, that is another subject. The mother is small, finally, compared to the immense powers which cross it and exceed it, summoning the past (the history and traumas of the previous generations) and the whole family ecosystem (with its members, its places, its landscapes, nature, its rules …). All this brews in depth, uncovers vulnerabilities, which explains postpartum depressions and conflicts that arise when a child arrives.

Why, once adult, can it be difficult to understand yourself?

It is not only in adulthood that our mother and we do not understand each other! After tearing birth, otherness is suffering. Some consider that one will be his whole life in search of a maternal uterus; I rather think that we are going to seek maternal functions: being nourished, protected, touched, in communication, educated, encouraged …, functions which can be assumed, when one is a child, by the mother, the father or any other person. But, as mother and child were for a time confused, the incommunicability between the two amazes us. And it is normal that a mother continues to want to feed her children or advise them, whether it likes them or not. All the challenge is to know which maternal functions are still active, which are deciduous, and how mother and child can evolve together in this relationship in perpetual movement.

How do the mother and her child become an adult sometimes find themselves in an incomprehensible emotional chaos from the outside?

This is the perfect definition of what I call a “breach”, an area of ​​disorder that tends to disorganize what surrounds it. On unpredictable occasions, we are projected in exchanges where a breach is active. For example when a mother makes a derogatory remark to her son or daughter on her way of raising her children; Or when this one insists on a decision to be taken contrary to what the mother wants. Here, a misunderstanding; There, a reactivated narcissistic injury. There is a history: all the episodes of the past that have not completed their effects are reactivated.

How to avoid these moments of chaos?

It is impossible to avoid them. You can’t help but suffer, from being injured. When a breach manifests, it is too late: we are shaken, overwhelmed. We say things that we regret as soon as say. The storm came because something favored the emergence of this incident. What the breach needs is a cooling. Everyone has their way. The best is to move away, calm down, time being our best ally. Then avoid the rehashing and come back – later – explore the breach for two: by telling yourself and reapping the event.

How to achieve it without a breach manifesting itself again?

Do not be afraid to put yourself in a vulnerability position: “I felt injured because … I injured you because …” It’s difficult – sometimes almost impossible when there are more closed personalities than others -, but if this work is done, vulnerabilities turn into sensitivities. If we understand with the head, then the heart will open. Anyway, you will have to go there, because, explored with your mother or not, these breaches will be present in all your relationships, with your partner, your children … where the mother will be lacking, you will have to be your own mother, that is to say take care of yourself, console yourself.

We would like to settle the difficulty in a single conversation, but no!

You will have to come back several times, that’s for sure. Reducing a breach requires courage, because you have to agree to explain it, and therefore to expose yourself to the risk of suffering again. This requires patience, to listen to the intimate movements that go through our being, but also societal, historical movements, which operate in our psychians. And to have confidence in the fact that the process is progressing: yes, it’s slow, you sometimes have the impression of making a tread, but we progress in a spiral. Another form of confidence, which goes hand in hand with immeasurable benevolence, consists in saying: let us fall, we will survive it! This means that we can say to his mother: I know that we are failing, but together we survive these failures!

How to understand relationships with her aging mother?

The novelty today consists in what we can keep our mothers between eighty and a hundred years. However, this first in the history of humanity is only considered from the angle of decline, because only adults at work are “useful” to the capitalist system. But after-80 years can be rich. So, archaic perceptions are resuscitated and resume step on social codes. Water, air, earth, fire: the four elements become fundamental. Listening to a voice, music, touching or being touched, caressing an animal, walking in the wild, taste a silent presence that can open to a great depth meditation are real adventures. If at a societal level, the adult period is the optimum, it is not sure that this is the case for the individual. Opening up to new temporalities with your “old mother”, going to rediscover these essential sensations is also a crucial experience for the adult son or daughter.

* Step of psychological development, where the child, faced with his image in the mirror, becomes aware of his body and himself.