ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some reflections on the mental health of women that are the fruit of clinical observations in the field of pathology and in everyday life. It describes the levels of transformation that the body undergoes throughout life and discusses some significant characteristics in women, the substratum of which has to do with fluids. Fluid psychic characteristics have a direct influence on the mind, they give rise to new symbolic equations and they are closely linked to reproductive phenomena such as motherhood and breastfeeding. The body, a soma predetermined by the ontogenetic and phylogenetic human condition, has itself psychic consequences as well as social and cultural ones. Motherhood makes the psychic flesh aware of life and death, and it entails both narcissistic satisfaction and frustration. The symbolic "negative"/"no" inaugurates a new somatopsychic act which produces a kind of de-symbolization that de-cathects the metaphoric–metonymic shifts in the register of possession and power.
