The Dead Mother

The Work of Andre Green

Gregorio Kohon, Gregorio Kohon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134708994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

The Dead Mother brings together original essays in honour of André Green. Written by distinguished psychoanalysts, the collection develops the theme of his most famous paper of the same title, and describes the value of the dead mother to other areas of clinical interest: psychic reality, borderline phenomena, passions and identification.

The concept of the 'dead mother' describes a clinical phenomenon, sometimes difficult to identify, but always present in a substantial number of patients. It describes a process by which the image of a living and loving mother is transformed into a distant figure; a toneless, practically inanimate, dead parent. In reality, the mother remains alive, but she has psychically 'died' for the child.

This produces a depression in the child, who carries these feelings within him into adult life, as the experience of the loss of the mother's love is followed by the loss of meaning in life. Nothing makes sense any more for the child, but life seems to continue under the appearance of normality.

The Dead Mother is a valuable contribution to literature on psychoanalytic and psychotheraputic approaches to grief, loss and depression.

1
THE GREENING OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

André Green in dialogues with Gregorio Kohon

GK	I actually haven't prepared any specific questions...
AG	Neither did I
GK	.. .but one thingt I though: of asking you is to talk about your life, before we talk about your work.
AG	As you may know, there are two books that have been written about me One is Un Psychoanalyste Engagé,^1 a book which initially was a series of conversations with a Swiss-Spanish colleague. The other one was François Dupare's André Green.^2 I don't mind doing it again.
GK	Good.
AG	I was born in Egypt in 1927, in Cairo. My father came from Alexandria, while my mother's family was established in Egypt from the fifteenth century; both came from a Sephardic background. My mother's maiden name was Barcilon. By the way, I have a cousin in New York whose name is Joée Barcilon. The history of my maternal family is well known; they tad come from Spain and moved to Spanish Morocco, Tangier, and then they crossed all the borders, if there were any, along the shores of the sea, the Mediterranean and settled finally in Egypt, firstly in the delta of the Nile, and in the end in Cairo and Alexandria.
GK	This was a direct consequence of the Inquisition.
AG	Yes. In contrast, my father’s family’s history is much more obscure to us, for different reasons. My father never spoke much of his own family.Most of his family were in Alexandria. We lived in Cairo. He had a sister in Cairo but he did not have much contact with the part of the family that remained in Alexandria. His family had Spanish and Portuguese origins. My father understood Spanish but did not speak it, while my mother did. How they came about to be in Egypt is more mysterious. There is a family story saying that they had been in Hungary, so they probably came from the other side, through Europe, Western Europe, they went down via Turkey and the Middle East and arrived in Egypt. Well, this is the official story. I know that my father had cousins who were wealthier than he was, and it is thanks to them that my name now is spelt ‘Green’ because they added an ‘e’ to the original name which was ‘Gren’. Nothing to do with else. One of my father’s cousins, who probably was a bit snobbish, decided to add an ‘e’ to make it sound more English and all the other Grens decided this was a good idea and did the same. Since when my father’s family was in Egypt, it is difficult to know. Anyhow, life in Egypt was a very special thing. There was a very strong French influence in Egypt, which probably started with Bonaparte’s expedition in 1799. If, for instance, you read French literature, all the great French writers had their trip to the Orient with a relatively lengthy stay in Egypt—Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Nerval, many others. And they all gave accounts of very pleasant memories from Egypt. There was the Arabic community and the European community, and although the English were important in politics and in administration, the common language of all the so-called Europeans in fact was not Arabic, but French. The culture was cosmopolitan but the language and the strongest influence came from France. The strongest impetus was given later under Mehmed Ali, who was francophile. I have memories I have memories that may surprise some people. When my mother listened to the radio, for example, listened to the news saying that Paris had fallen to the German army, she cried. France was important for all of us. There were also special circumstances in my family, which explains why France was especially important. My eldest sister (who was 14 years older than me) was 14 when she had a disease which is called in French, mal de Pott, tuberculosis of the vertebral column, which was impossible to treat in Egypt at the time. This institution which specialised in the treatment of these diseases (which at that time lasted four years) was in France. So my sister was put in this institution in the north of France and she stayed there for four years. My mother was—like any mother whose daughter was away because of an illness—very sad and rather depressed and my parents used to go for holidays to France as soon as school stopped. They would spend two months there to enable my mother to stay with my sister. So, that was also a reason for France being important for my family before my birth.
GK	How many siblings did you have?
AG	I had three siblings. I had two sisters and one elder brother but I happened to be the accident of the family. I was born nine years after my elder brother, who was the youngest of the three, and, as I said, there were fourteen years between my elder sister and myself. The diagnosis of my mother’s pregnancy was made in Paris and that’s also a reason why France could have been important to me, unconsciously.
GK	What about your grandparents? Did you grow up in the context of a close, strong family within a large extended family?
AG	I didn’t know any of my grandparents; my brother and sisters didn’t know them either. I didn’t know what a grandfather or grandmother meant. My father had little contact with his own family. When he went to Alexandria, he did visit his sister, especially one of his sisters; I believe there were seven. But my father had no strong ties with his family. My mother, that was totally different. She spoke with great respect and awe of her father, whom I imagined as a kind of scholar feared by everyone in the family. They were a very united family; she was all the time at her brother’s house and her sister’s home and so on. But I wouldn’t say that in my own family, family life was very important. I had a special position, being the youngest. I had cousins of my age, who lived in Alexandria, but I saw them only in the summer when I used to go to Alexandria because of the sea and the resorts by the sea. But even then…I only had one cousin who I used to see frequently. Although we were Jewish, Sephardic Jews, it was a paradoxical situation: while Jewishness was absolutely affirmed, there was no religious practice whatsoever. I never knew what a Shabbat was. We were Jews at Yom Kippur; we went to the synagogue on Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Passover. There is a legend that when I was born, my father went to the synagogue and when he heard the rabbi singing Eliyahu ha-Navi, towards the end of the Sabbath service, he decided that my name would be Elijah, but unfortunately he did not register it. My father was not a religious person but two years before he died—and he knew he would die soon because he had a serious illness—a rabbi came home to teach him Hebrew, so he may have wanted to be…
GK	…at peace with the Almighty, after all.
AG	Yes, all clear before he died…You know, friends were important, very important. When I arrived in Europe it was a considerable change for me, because in Egypt I was at home in any of my friends’ homes. I could come at any time, leave at any time, share the meal, and be considered a member of the family. There was no question about this. When I arrived in France I think it took one year before anyone invited me to his or her home. People who wanted to see me saw me in the café.
GK	What age are we talking about then; when did you go to Paris, and why?
AG	Well, important things happened in my family. First, I lost my father when I was 14, not yet 14. Both of my parents died at 59, and there was a difference, eight years difference, between my father and my mother. They both died, so I was 14 when my father died; by then, the financial situation of the family wasn’t good at all. My father had had a lot of money, but because of my sister’s illness, he had to accompany my mother when she came to Europe. Also, her cure in France was very expensive; it lasted four years. That meant that his job was out of his control for two months every time. He lost his good financial position. The last years of my father’s life were not very happy in terms of his professional career, though he was a very intelligent man whose intelligence was recognised by others. After his death, my family didn’t know what they were going to do. Part of my family wished me to go into business in order to work as soon as possible, to help the family. But I was good at school and one sister saw how sad I was (she had also suffered because her studies had been interrupted too soon) and she decided to take on my defence and to convince the family that I should continue till the baccalauréat, which I did. And then something else happened. I fell ill at the last year, not the last year, it was the year before the last one, and I couldn’t go to school. I had to stay in bed all the time but I still prepared my examination, the first part of the baccalauréat, and I succeeded. My family was impressed and decided to help me. I got a scholarship for half and the family helped me with the other half. Finally, I went to France at the age of 19, the year that coincided with the end of the war and the start of university. But to tell you the truth, I had it in mind to go to Europe under any circumstance long before. I went there to do my studies, but I hadn’t decided yet what to do. One rich uncle gave me an amount of money, saying to me that he had done something for each of my brother and sisters, he hadn’t done anything for me, and so he decided to give me a certain sum and left me free to use it as I wanted. It was my responsibility and I decided to use that money for studying, but still I had to decide what to study. My inclination would have been to study philosophy but as I wasn’t French, I had no nationality, there was no point. The only way to earn a living with philosophy is to teach, and if you have no nationality and if you haven’t got the right diplomas, you can’t do that. So I gave up that idea pretty quickly
GK	No nationality? Presumably you had an Egyptian passport?
AG	No, no.
GK	How did you travel?
AG	Apatride! I was a stateless person. My father, after having been in Egypt for many generations, thought that we would be granted nationality automatically. He was wrong. Now, philosophy, you see, was out of the question. I decided maybe I can do some kind of scientific studies but I was discouraged from doing this. One of my uncles said, ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to analyse ka-ka and pee-pee all your life? It’s not interesting, don’t do that, it’s absurd.’ And finally I made a bet; I took up a challenge, because you can’t call that otherwise, it was a bet. I said, ‘I’m going to do medicine’, having already in mind that I would become a psychiatrist. I never wanted to be a general practitioner.
GK	Why psychiatry? How did you come to this decision?
AG	Here, of course, we start the analysis. I believe that the dead mother is a paper which has been valued not only because of its clinical findings, but because it is linked to a personal experience. When I was 2 years old, my mother had a depression: she had a younger sister, who died after having been burned accidentally. She was the youngest sister of the family, my Aunt Rose, and my mother got depressed. I have seen photographs—one can tell from her face that she had really a very severe depression. At that time, treatment was very poor. She went to rest in a thermal station near Cairo. I can only suppose that I have been very strongly marked by this experience which, of course, needed three analyses to relive fully. This must have been the reason, because I remember a conversation I had with a friend of my father when I was 12, in which I said already then that I wanted to study the mental diseases.
GK	Your mother had gone away, who looked after you? Your sisters? Do you know?
AG	At that time the family situation was still good, financially. When I was young we had European nurses, mostly Italian.
GK	Italian? Not French?
AG	No, no, no. You know, the French in Egypt were a special colony; they usually did not live in Cairo. They lived in the canal area. They were people from the canal administration; they lived in Port Said. Those who lived in Cairo and Alexandria were either teachers (who taught in the French institutions) or were working with the embassy, the consulate, the cultural politics of France. So we had no French governess; the governesses were usually Italian or, in some very highbrow families, English nurses. So the person who looked after me must have been an Italian governess and my two sisters. When the family lost part of its wealth my sister took care of me. My sister stopped school at 14. I was 12 years younger. She was a second mother to me as I was 2 years old when she left school. My father had already financial problems because of my older sister’s illness.
GK	So you go to Paris to study medicine, wanting to do psychiatry. What year do you arrive in Paris?
AG	1946.
GK	The war had just ended. AG I took the second boat that made the connection between Egypt and Marseilles; when we arrived in Marseilles we had to wait for four days until we could take the train to Paris. I arrived in Paris on the 8th of May and I remember there was a celebration of the victory.
GK	A very special time to arrive to Paris.
AG	Yes, it was a special time. Paris was not completely out of the war. Of course, there was peace; yes, 1946—it was the first anniversary, but still there was nothing to eat, you had to have vouchers for everything. But this was not the main thing—parents always care for their poor children’s food. This was not important to us. What was most important for us was how very isolated we all felt. It was such a difference coming from Egypt, where everybody knew everybody. We didn’t possess a colonial mentality because we knew that we were not ‘the masters of the land’. The masters were the British, as far as foreigners were concerned, or the pashas, the wealthy landowners; these were the masters. But, of course, we were the privileged Europeans who could benefit from the European educational system; we belonged to a kind of closed society, but we were not the masters.
GK	What kind of school did you attend? You mentioned the baccalauréat.
AG	There were all sorts of schools. There was an English school, for those who wanted to send their children to England or to have an English education. There was an Italian school, which was a very good school, and just as the communities had their own hospitals—the Greeks had their hospitals, the Italians had their hospitals, the Americans had theirs—they also had their schools. As far as the French were concerned, there were two types of school, and this was a capital difference between the two: one was religious, the Brothers of Saint Mark. The other was the French laque school; we felt in the laque school that we were really at the top of the world; we were not religious and we were French, we were the l’esprit de la République française.
GK	You arrive in Paris, feeling French but an apatride, a Jew with no passport wanting to go to university. Was it easy to get in the university then?
AG	It was automatic, just as it is today. The problem was that I had made myself…illusioned. I thought that as soon as I arrived in France, I immediately would be in contact with the young French intellectuals. Nothing of the kind happened, of course. When I arrived on Boulevard Saint Michel and tried to see where ‘the young French intellectuals’ were, I couldn’t see anybody. It was a feeling of complete isolation, a feeling of being lost in the crowd, the Paris crowd, a crowd of poor students. I had also a lot of ambivalence on my part about medicine. I wanted to become a psychiatrist from the beginning; I knew that I could not see a psychiatric patient before four to five years, so I had to wait, and I had to suffer. The teaching of medicine was very boring. For the first years, I was a bad student. I didn’t pay much attention to my exams and I used to work for myself; I studied philosophy, psychology; I read books about culture, not very useful for my medical training.
GK	Hanna Arendt makes the distinction somewhere between Judaism and Jewishness; she argues that there has been an important, fundamental change in history: Jews have kept an identity as Jews; they might be in touch with their Jewishness, but they have lost their religiosity, their Judaism. When you arrived to Paris in 1946, was there any relevance in your being Jewish?
AG	Yes. I knew, of course, that there still was anti-Semitism in France, as it has always been. But one must say that during those times, anti-Semitism was not so evident as it had been before and during the war. The war was very recent and we knew about concentration camps; people were still shocked. When I think of myself back then, my Jewish identity was unimportant for me. I didn’t specially look for Jews, or non-Jews. I was still in contact with the Jewish friends who had come from Egypt; we used to live in the same hotel, seeing each other, going into each other’s rooms, and chatting and having meals together sometimes. When I started to go to the university, this was the first opportunity to meet a true mixture of people, some Jews and some non-Jews; I must say, personally, I always had good relationships with all of them. Now, one day, I met a young girl who I found very attractive and I invited her to go out to the theatre or something like that, and she said to me, ‘I’m not allowed to go out with young men who have not been presented to my parents.’ I said I didn’t mind, that I was ready to meet her parents. And that’s where she replied, ‘It’s impossible for me to bring you home because you are Jewish.’ So that was the first time, and I must say, the unique time in which somebody told me that I was excluded from something because of being a Jew. I was somehow shocked, but I recovered from it. The great change, again, was when I won the concours...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Greening of Psychoanalysis
• 2. Psychic Reality, Negation, and the Analytic Setting
• 3. The Dead Mother Syndrome and the Reconstruction of Trauma
• 4. Dead Mother, Dead Child
• 5. The Undead: Necromancy and the Inner World
• 6. Analysing Forms of Aliveness and Deadness of the Transference— Countertransference
• 7. The Dead Mother: Variations On a Theme
• 8. Taking Aims: André Green and the Pragmatics of Passion
• 9. The Interplay of Identifications: Violence, Hysteria and the Repudiation of Femininity
• 10. The Dynamics of the History of Psychoanalysis: Anna Freud, Leo Rangell and André Green
• 11. The Intuition of the Negative In Playing and Reality