When, in 1953, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott spoke for the first time of the ” good enough mother »Is nearly half a century of guilt of mothers by psychoanalysis which finally loosens its fangs a little. This mother, neither “totally good” nor “totally bad”, by her inclination “sufficient” to meet the needs of her baby, could finally be both content and “fallible”.
After observing hundreds of interactions involving infants and their mothers, the expert had simply uncovered what parents of our time seem to need so much to remember: the fallibility of the parent, the “disillusion” of the child. child facing the ideal parent, is not only normal, but necessary for the emergence of what we call the ” true self “, The” true self “in children.
Obviously, this fallibility takes place in a multitude of other attitudes, within a continual flow of interactions from which ultimately emerges a “sufficiently large number” of positive parental responses. On this subject, the most recent work of psychoanalysts Beatrice Beebe, Phyllis Cohen and Franck Lachmann, who analyzed every millisecond of hours, captured on camera, of exchanges between mothers and infants, are worth seeing. We come out tender, of course, but even more convinced of how much Homo sapiens is, upon his arrival on earth, a deeply relational creature, whose survival depends on a continual intersubjectivity with his figures of attachment.
Our pandemic mental health hecatombs have reminded us of this. No, we humans are not made, neither for prolonged loneliness, nor to stand in front of two-dimensional images of faces on the flat screen as colleagues for so many months.
Still, in this December when all parents are rushing, credit cards in hand, to the satisfaction of their children’s desires, Winnicott’s words still seem so right to me. In tune with the rest of our culture, contemporary parent-child relationships seem to tolerate neither emptiness nor dissatisfaction, often transforming what should be a “good enough” (but above all true) interaction into a “representation” of the relationship, as it “should be”. The result is a deep emotional misery, which begins with the feeling of “emptiness in oneself”, the fear of interiority and a real inability to be authentic. Many of the symptoms one would think take their source in those theaters which take us all away from what we simply need; authentic interactions, “sufficiently adjusted” to our needs.
While we are so eager to “see the magic in their eyes”, it is good to remember that it is also a reflection of our unfailing parentage that we wish to rediscover. If a few counter-proposals to this image of the perfect parent have inhabited public space over the past decade, the fact remains that, in privacy, parental guilt, the feeling of insufficiency and narcissistic rivalries between parents (separated or not) occupy our famous mental burdens.
Parents are not to blame, having been diverted, often as soon as the pregnancy is announced, from their own knowledge by a series of professionals who, if they are well-intentioned, nevertheless transmit the message that “knowing how to bring into the world”. a child and educating him ”is indeed“ outside of oneself ”and not“ in oneself ”.
As you write me the story of your melancholy Christmases, of your imperfect families, sometimes riddled with various conflicts and heartbreaks, it is not the satisfaction of knowing that you are suffering that I feel, of course, but something of the so reassuring humanity with which we are imbued, when we are true. This truth seems to me the beginning of all repairs, as here, in the story of Flavie who, with her images, winks to the mother “who contains”, but also to the fragile and magnificent imperfection of life. .
“I started to hate Christmas when my mother fell ill with cancer at 46 years old. I was 12 years old. She died five years later, at the age of 51, at the end of an ordeal that no one in our family has ever mentioned again.
Now, I wander between hating these absurd festivals and the desire to mark the solstice, the return of the light, with maybe, sometimes, the people I love.
I will soon be pulling out my fragile pink glass balls, which I have had for decades.
They are made of glass, not plastic. To me that matters.
I put them in a beautiful crystal vase that comes to me from my mother, mixed with garlands cheap of silver dollarama beads. It’s pretty. “
Yes, Flavie, it’s very pretty. It’s like life.
* To take a look at the work of Beatrice Beebe: beatricebeebe.com/books