The Maternal Experience Encounters with Ambivalence and Love Women and Psychology Series

The Maternal Experience explores the powerful and dynamic nature of maternal ambivalence and disrupts the conventional narrative of the mother?s lived experience by arguing that encounters with feelings of hatred are both universal and have the capacity to stimulate and enrich her maternal love.

The book draws on the author?s personal mothering experiences, those of other women, and examples from film to inspire new introspection about the everyday maternal experience. Lowy takes a psychosocial approach to weave thinking from selected psychoanalytic and contemporary accounts together with personal stories to explore how maternal ambivalence operates, and how mothering is sourced in psychic struggles between loving and hating feelings in an atmosphere that is rife with social and personal expectations and prohibitions. By reworking the experience of maternal ambivalence, the book secures an understanding of the mother?s feelings of hatred as a catalyst for her love and allows these maligned and taboo emotions to be named and reframed into acceptable and transformative feelings.

Brought alive by examples from film and first-hand experience, this book is fascinating reading for academics and students of psychology, maternal and women?s studies, and sociology, as well as practitioners in the fields of psychology, social work, medicine and counselling.

Preamble: The myth. 1. Opening: lived experience, storytelling and maternal ambivalence 2. What is maternal ambivalence? Conflict, contradiction, confusion and the maternal ideal 3. History of thought on maternal ambivalence: locating the mother’s voice amid patriarchy, taboos and feelings of ambivalence 4. Donald Winnicott’s good-enough mother: transformation through maternal love, failure, repair and moments of hatred 5. Melanie Klein: there’s no love without hate—movement between the rigid paranoid-schizoid and the integrated depressive position 6. Wilfred R. Bion: learning from experience as a source of maternal change, understanding and wisdom 7. Conclusions: the experience of maternal love and hate. Bibliography. Index.

Margo Lowy is a psychotherapist with an interest in mothering and women’s reproductive health. She completed her doctorate and her research master's at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, investigating the fields of maternal ambivalence and infertility.