ABSTRACT
The condensed expression ‘maternal eroticism’ attributes to motherhood a bio-psychological dimension rather than a psychological function devoted to child development. The mother’s subjectivity and its bodily manifestations through pregnancy, labor, childbirth, and child care imply physical and psychical transformations that are a source of deep disruption in the psychic organization of the mother. This chapter aims to study the roles and the risks of these disruptions which mobilize the mother’s libidinal drives to the extreme. The maternal transformation of a woman contributes, for better or worse, to the development of the child’s mental apparatus and leaves its marks in the adult’s psychic organization. In addition to the reactivation of possible traumatic wounds, phantasies around narcissistic regression, merging experience, and mental breakdown are part the maternal experience, which can be replayed in the maternal transference with the analyst.
