ABSTRACT
All traditions of psychoanalytic thought share the principle that conflict ‘produces psychic life through the exigency of thought’ (Mitchell 2003: 72) and is to a great extent outside the realm of conscious awareness. It is the principles of unconscious dynamics, conflict, intersubjectivity, body and mind as constituting subjectivity that guide the understanding of the capacity to care in this book. These characterise the infant-mother relationship (in a sense even before birth). Whether or not the mother has a distinct sense of her own self, she is now implicated in a new unit, created out of the fact of pregnancy, infantile dependence and a whole human cultural history of female reproductivity. Developmental psychoanalysis has been criticised for focusing on the baby to the exclusion of understanding the mother’s position, except as object of her baby’s demands. In an important sense, she is such
an object, and my treatment in this chapter reflects that, while maintaining the tension between this and the mother as subject in her own right. In addition, here I concentrate on providing an account of babies’ development of a capacity to care, whereas in the following chapter I shift focus to a theorisation of maternal subjectivity. In both cases, the emphasis is on the intersubjectivity of the motherchild couple, so that it is impossible to separate out analysis of one from the other.
