Mães em sofrimento : o mal-estar na maternidade a partir de uma perspectiva psicanalítica

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand the malaise in motherhood manifested by women affected, with the arrival of the child, by a significant amount of suffering. The initial hypothesis for this malaise, which emerged from listening to these women in their analysis process, was that it would be related to the attempt to carry out the infallible motherhood prescribed by family specialists. Therefore, initially, I contextualized the historical moment in which these women live to locate the discourses and cultural imperatives around the woman and the mother, which influence, today, the experience of women with motherhood. Then, I held an exhibition on femininity, motherhood, and castration, since it is not possible to talk about motherhood without addressing the theme of the feminine and castration. To elucidate this discussion, I brought clinical reports, in the form of vignettes, that refer to the women contemplated in this research, and excerpts from intimate diaries written by women-mothers who shared their experience with motherhood on social networks and through the publication of books. At the end of this exposition, I concluded that the malaise in motherhood, in the case of these women, is due to the difficulty of being confronted with the not-all the feminine, that is, of dealing with the division that a child inscribes in the feminine subject between the mother and the woman. In order to understand this difficulty on the part of these women to be more than a mother, a woman who wants more than a child, I made, in the third chapter, an exposition about the mother-daughter relationship. This exposition led me to conclude that this difficulty in sustaining a feminine position, after the arrival of the child, is a consequence of the fact that these women are devastated in their relationship with their mother, who have not established the necessary distance for them to build a femininity and a destiny of their own, different from their mother. This justifies the obsessive search to embody the model of mother prescribed by family specialists, which transforms motherhood into a difficult and conflicting experience. Because it is a model that summons the woman who becomes a mother to inscribe herself in the relationship with her child, thus updating, through this relationship, what she experienced with her own mother in the early days of her childhood.