ABSTRACT
The dead mother is a mother who remains alive but who is, so to speak, psychically dead in the eyes of the young child in her care. The consequence of the real death of the mother – especially when this is due to suicide – is extremely harmful to the child whom she leaves behind. Psychoanalytic theory, which is founded on the interpretation of A. Freudian thought, allots a major role to the concept of the dead father, whose fundamental function is the genesis of the superego, as outlined in Totem and Taboo. The dead mother complex is a revelation of the transference. When the subject presents himself to the analyst for the first time, the symptoms of which he complains are not essentially of a depressive kind. When analysis has succeeded in rendering life to the aspect of the child which is identified with the dead mother, a strange reversal will take place.
