ABSTRACT
Dear friend, I have great admiration for the way you formulated your interpretation regarding
the mother of your psychotic patient: “Why do you think that your mother always tells you the truth?” Congratulations! The difficulty in these clinical contexts is that although we have to acknowledge the cruelty of these mothers, we must not forget that the unconscious representation of a mother is built on a number of factors among which the reality of the actual experience is not always the predominant element. The remarkable thing about your formulation is that you preserve the possibility that this mother might have been, at least once in her life, truthful with her daughter. It matters little that this probability is very slim. What interests us concerns less about what actually took place rather than the supposition that something took place that allowed the emergence in the psyche of the idea of a good mother. And one of the conditions required for this “something” to be rediscovered is the analyst’s relatively kind treatment of who the mother is in reality.
