ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how feminist psychoanalysis informs clinical work with mothers. The maternal is a subject position so conflictual that it has been proposed a theoretical question in the fields of psychoanalysis and feminism. This question has stimulated developments in contemporary feminist psychoanalysis that inform clinical work with mothers. The feminist theories that have forced psychoanalysis to address its blind spots related to embodied maternal subjectivity are discussed. The “problem” of maternal embodiment in the context of trauma points towards a somatic understanding. The relational feminist psychoanalytic approach illuminates how the challenge in clinical work with the new mother lies in her physical transformation that impacts her deeply on psychological and social levels but integrated with somatic psychology it also points us to how the body becomes a crucial focus on clinical work. Feminist psychoanalysis offers theories particular to the maternal transition and maternal embodied subjectivity that guide relational somatic treatment from general to specific for the expecting or new mother with trauma history by illuminating the convergence of psychological and somatic pressures from the maternal transition and trauma.
