Long-term effects
Lack of maternal love: What André Green called the ‘dead mother’
Lack of maternal love: What André Green called the ‘dead mother’
DESCRIPTION: Lack of maternal love: Long-term consequences in adulthood, causes and ways of coming to terms with it. André Green’s ‘dead mother’ describes how a mother who is physically present but emotionally absent shapes her child.
A lack of maternal love and the ‘dead mother’: the ever-present yet unattainable figure
Anyone who, as an adult, searches for the long-term consequences of a lack of maternal love will usually find lists of symptoms, signs and ways to heal. Rarely will they find an explanation of how such a thing arises when the mother was there every day, cooked, took them to school and never raised her voice. The French psychoanalyst André Green described this experience in 1980 in a lecture that ranks among the most frequently cited texts in post-Freudian psychoanalysis: ‘The Dead Mother’. This text follows his description, supplements it with Winnicott and research on infancy, and asks what conclusions can be drawn from this for our understanding of mothers who were not malicious.
A mother who is physically alive but emotionally silent
The title refers to a mother who, whilst physically alive, is essentially unreachable to her child. This is usually triggered by the mother’s depression following a loss: the death of a child or a parent, a miscarriage, or a hurt she cannot get over. The mother remains present only physically. She cares for her child, she may smile, but her attention is focused on her grief. The child experiences this change as abrupt: just a moment ago she was lively and attentive; now she is far away, even though nothing has changed outwardly.
The 1980 lecture was published in 1983 in the volume *Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort*, and in English in 1986 in *On Private Madness*. Green wrote from his clinical practice. He treated patients who suffered from a sense of emptiness, numbness and the feeling of not being alive, and whose life stories contained no obvious catastrophe: no violence, no loss, no neglect. In analysis, what became apparent was the absence of an experience that could not be recalled at all.
What the child does
The child reacts in stages. First, it tries to revive the mother. It becomes attentive, lively, entertaining, sometimes restless. If this has no effect, it withdraws its investment from the mother as a living counterpart, so as not to have to feel the pain triggered by her absence. Green speaks of ‘disinvestment’ and calls the result ‘white mourning’ (deuil blanc): the child mourns someone who has not died and has no words for it, because nothing has happened that could be named.
Subsequently, the child identifies with the dead mother. They take on her absence. They become silent, inwardly empty and cautious in dealing with emotions. Green describes how a hole forms at this core, which no relationship can later fill. Added to this is a deep anger towards the mother, which must not be felt because the child does not want to lose her. The anger remains unconscious and damages relationships, without the person affected realising how.
What this looks like in adulthood
The adults Green describes often have unremarkable life stories. They are successful at work, and sometimes in love too, yet complain of something they find hard to put their finger on. They feel empty, exhausted, lacking in drive and enthusiasm. They can love without feeling that they are loving. They experience closeness as a threat, because it mirrors the moment when their mother left. Or they desperately seek out people to revitalise them, thereby making them responsible for something they cannot possibly fulfil.
In therapy, the ‘dead mother’ depression does not manifest as sadness. Green calls it a ‘depression without feeling’, in which the experience of loss is absent because the connection to what was lost could never be put into words. This observation aligns with what the blog describes as ‘desymbolisation’: an experience that found no connection to language remains potent and is experienced as a void. The difference from Alfred Lorenzer’s concept lies in the fact that, according to Green, symbolisation fails right from the early mother-child relationship. It is a primarily unsymbolised experience, rather than a repressed one.
Long-term consequences in adulthood: How those affected recognise a lack of maternal love
A lack of maternal love rarely manifests as a memory but frequently as a state of being. Those affected describe low self-esteem that is not bolstered even by success, a fragile sense of basic trust, perfectionism as an attempt to still earn affection, and difficulties in relationships: closeness triggers withdrawal, or withdrawal triggers clinging. Many experience self-doubt for no apparent reason and a sense of emptiness at times that ought to be joyful. Added to this are depression and anxiety disorders, which, according to studies on early neglect, occur more frequently.
The term ‘basic trust’ was coined by Erik Erikson and refers to the earliest experience that the world is safe, life is beautiful, one’s own self is lovable, and one’s own needs are met. Green describes the loss of this experience as occurring when the response was physically present but internally absent.
Winnicott and the mother’s gaze
Donald Winnicott laid the groundwork for Green’s ideas. In his work on the mirroring function of the mother and family (1967), he asks what an infant sees when looking into the mother’s face. His answer: themselves. The mother who looks at the child gives the child back its sense of self. If she is lost in her own thoughts and merely reflects her own mood, the child sees her face and not itself.
As early as 1956, Winnicott had described ‘primary mothering’ – the state of heightened receptivity in which a mother is attuned to the infant’s needs during the first few weeks. The child can only progress in its development if the mother is sufficiently available. Winnicott’s ‘good-enough mother’ is not an idealised figure, but one who is sufficiently present.
Infant research later tested this observation experimentally. In 1978, in the ‘Still-Face’ experiment, Edward Tronick and his colleagues asked mothers to display a motionless face for a short time whilst interacting with their infant. The infants initially tried to re-engage the mother by smiling, pointing and making sounds. When this failed, they turned away, appeared distressed and withdrew. The experiment lasts only a few minutes and cannot be equated with Green’s description of a prolonged depression. However, it demonstrates the same sequence that Green describes clinically: an attempt to re-engage, withdrawal, and freezing.
The mother was in mourning
The concept of the ‘dead mother’ is often interpreted as an accusation. This contradicts what Green wrote. According to his description, the mother was trapped in a state of grief from which she herself could not escape. Behind her absence there is usually a personal history: a child who has died, a mother she lost at an early age, a husband who left her. This pattern is passed down through generations because no one was able to speak of the loss.
This perspective differs from the tone of many self-help books on the so-called ‘toxic mother’. They cast the mother as the perpetrator and the child as the victim, and consequently call for a break. Green’s description offers no basis for this. It shows that both the mother and the daughter or son suffer from the same void, and it grants the child the right to name the loss without the mother having to be condemned for it. Anyone who feels relieved by the term may do so without making accusations. Anyone looking for someone to blame will not find one in Green’s work.
Why mothers may lack the ability to show love
An emotionally cold mother is rarely unfeeling. Behind this coldness lie, more often than not, overwhelming demands, postnatal depression, a childhood devoid of warmth, or a loss that was never properly mourned. Studies on postnatal depression describe its effects on early mother-child interaction, such as reduced eye contact and fewer responses to the infant’s cues. Mothers who are unable to show love have often never experienced it themselves. Understanding the mother does not undo the loss of the child.
The connection to the ‘replacement child’
One situation in which the ‘dead mother’ complex frequently arises is that of the ‘replacement child’. If a child is born after the death of a sibling, the mother may grieve for the first child whilst caring for the second. The second child lives with a shadow they do not recognise, and with the task of replacing a deceased child. Green’s description explains why these children often feel as though they are there and yet are not seen.
A connection can also be drawn to the family scapegoat, although this connection is a hypothesis and does not originate with Green: where a mother is emotionally absent, an unspoken loss remains within the family system, and it may be assigned to a child who acts it out vicariously.
Coping with a lack of maternal love: what helps
Psychoanalytic treatment seeks to put the ‘white grief’ into words. This requires a partner who remains present and engaged when emptiness, withdrawal and anger enter the relationship. The loss is acknowledged, and anger towards the mother is allowed to surface without the relationship breaking down. Attachment research describes a counterpart to this as ‘acquired security’: people with an insecure early attachment can, through later reliable relationships – including therapeutic ones – develop an attachment pattern that resembles the secure type. Psychotherapy is recommended when emptiness, depression, anxiety or relationship problems dominate everyday life.
Why the term resonates today
Search queries regarding a lack of maternal love are numerous, and they invariably mention the same things: long-term consequences in adulthood, symptoms, healing. Those who make these enquiries are usually seeking an explanation for a feeling they cannot put into words. Green’s text offers one that does not moralise. The experience is real, even if no specific event can be identified. It lies in the absence of something that ought to have been there, and that is why it is difficult to articulate. This is the reason for its persistence and for the emptiness described by those affected.
Key points in brief
• In 1980, Green described the ‘dead mother’: physically present, but emotionally absent, usually following a loss or a bout of depression.
• The child first tries to revive the mother, then withdraws and identifies with her absence. Green calls the result ‘white grief’.
• Adults describe a sense of emptiness, low self-esteem, fragile basic trust and fear of relationships, often without any specific event they can recall.
• Winnicott and the Still-Face experiment demonstrate the same sequence: an attempt to revive, withdrawal, and paralysis.
• The mother was usually trapped in grief herself. Green’s description does not accuse her.
• Therapy puts words to ‘white grief’, and reliable relationships later in life can foster a sense of security.
Sources and further reading
· Green, A. (1983): La mère morte. In: Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. English: The dead mother. In: On Private Madness (1986). London: Hogarth Press.
· Winnicott, D. W. (1956): Primary maternal preoccupation.
· Winnicott, D. W. (1967): ‘Mirror-role of mother and family in child development’.
· Tronick, E. et al. (1978): The infant’s response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-7138(09)62273-1
· Erikson, E. H. (1950): Childhood and Society.
Related
DESCRIPTION: Lack of maternal love: Long-term consequences in adulthood, causes and ways of coming to terms with it. André Green’s ‘dead mother’ describes how a mother who is physically present but emotionally absent shapes her child.
A lack of maternal love and the ‘dead mother’: the ever-present yet unattainable figure
Anyone who, as an adult, searches for the long-term consequences of a lack of maternal love will usually find lists of symptoms, signs and ways to heal. Rarely will they find an explanation of how such a thing arises when the mother was there every day, cooked, took them to school and never raised her voice. The French psychoanalyst André Green described this experience in 1980 in a lecture that ranks among the most frequently cited texts in post-Freudian psychoanalysis: ‘The Dead Mother’. This text follows his description, supplements it with Winnicott and research on infancy, and asks what conclusions can be drawn from this for our understanding of mothers who were not malicious.
A mother who is physically alive but emotionally silent
The title refers to a mother who, whilst physically alive, is essentially unreachable to her child. This is usually triggered by the mother’s depression following a loss: the death of a child or a parent, a miscarriage, or a hurt she cannot get over. The mother remains present only physically. She cares for her child, she may smile, but her attention is focused on her grief. The child experiences this change as abrupt: just a moment ago she was lively and attentive; now she is far away, even though nothing has changed outwardly.
The 1980 lecture was published in 1983 in the volume *Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort*, and in English in 1986 in *On Private Madness*. Green wrote from his clinical practice. He treated patients who suffered from a sense of emptiness, numbness and the feeling of not being alive, and whose life stories contained no obvious catastrophe: no violence, no loss, no neglect. In analysis, what became apparent was the absence of an experience that could not be recalled at all.
What the child does
The child reacts in stages. First, it tries to revive the mother. It becomes attentive, lively, entertaining, sometimes restless. If this has no effect, it withdraws its investment from the mother as a living counterpart, so as not to have to feel the pain triggered by her absence. Green speaks of ‘disinvestment’ and calls the result ‘white mourning’ (deuil blanc): the child mourns someone who has not died and has no words for it, because nothing has happened that could be named.
Subsequently, the child identifies with the dead mother. They take on her absence. They become silent, inwardly empty and cautious in dealing with emotions. Green describes how a hole forms at this core, which no relationship can later fill. Added to this is a deep anger towards the mother, which must not be felt because the child does not want to lose her. The anger remains unconscious and damages relationships, without the person affected realising how.
What this looks like in adulthood
The adults Green describes often have unremarkable life stories. They are successful at work, and sometimes in love too, yet complain of something they find hard to put their finger on. They feel empty, exhausted, lacking in drive and enthusiasm. They can love without feeling that they are loving. They experience closeness as a threat, because it mirrors the moment when their mother left. Or they desperately seek out people to revitalise them, thereby making them responsible for something they cannot possibly fulfil.
In therapy, the ‘dead mother’ depression does not manifest as sadness. Green calls it a ‘depression without feeling’, in which the experience of loss is absent because the connection to what was lost could never be put into words. This observation aligns with what the blog describes as ‘desymbolisation’: an experience that found no connection to language remains potent and is experienced as a void. The difference from Alfred Lorenzer’s concept lies in the fact that, according to Green, symbolisation fails right from the early mother-child relationship. It is a primarily unsymbolised experience, rather than a repressed one.
Long-term consequences in adulthood: How those affected recognise a lack of maternal love
A lack of maternal love rarely manifests as a memory but frequently as a state of being. Those affected describe low self-esteem that is not bolstered even by success, a fragile sense of basic trust, perfectionism as an attempt to still earn affection, and difficulties in relationships: closeness triggers withdrawal, or withdrawal triggers clinging. Many experience self-doubt for no apparent reason and a sense of emptiness at times that ought to be joyful. Added to this are depression and anxiety disorders, which, according to studies on early neglect, occur more frequently.
The term ‘basic trust’ was coined by Erik Erikson and refers to the earliest experience that the world is safe, life is beautiful, one’s own self is lovable, and one’s own needs are met. Green describes the loss of this experience as occurring when the response was physically present but internally absent.
Winnicott and the mother’s gaze
Donald Winnicott laid the groundwork for Green’s ideas. In his work on the mirroring function of the mother and family (1967), he asks what an infant sees when looking into the mother’s face. His answer: themselves. The mother who looks at the child gives the child back its sense of self. If she is lost in her own thoughts and merely reflects her own mood, the child sees her face and not itself.
As early as 1956, Winnicott had described ‘primary mothering’ – the state of heightened receptivity in which a mother is attuned to the infant’s needs during the first few weeks. The child can only progress in its development if the mother is sufficiently available. Winnicott’s ‘good-enough mother’ is not an idealised figure, but one who is sufficiently present.
Infant research later tested this observation experimentally. In 1978, in the ‘Still-Face’ experiment, Edward Tronick and his colleagues asked mothers to display a motionless face for a short time whilst interacting with their infant. The infants initially tried to re-engage the mother by smiling, pointing and making sounds. When this failed, they turned away, appeared distressed and withdrew. The experiment lasts only a few minutes and cannot be equated with Green’s description of a prolonged depression. However, it demonstrates the same sequence that Green describes clinically: an attempt to re-engage, withdrawal, and freezing.
The mother was in mourning
The concept of the ‘dead mother’ is often interpreted as an accusation. This contradicts what Green wrote. According to his description, the mother was trapped in a state of grief from which she herself could not escape. Behind her absence there is usually a personal history: a child who has died, a mother she lost at an early age, a husband who left her. This pattern is passed down through generations because no one was able to speak of the loss.
This perspective differs from the tone of many self-help books on the so-called ‘toxic mother’. They cast the mother as the perpetrator and the child as the victim, and consequently call for a break. Green’s description offers no basis for this. It shows that both the mother and the daughter or son suffer from the same void, and it grants the child the right to name the loss without the mother having to be condemned for it. Anyone who feels relieved by the term may do so without making accusations. Anyone looking for someone to blame will not find one in Green’s work.
Why mothers may lack the ability to show love
An emotionally cold mother is rarely unfeeling. Behind this coldness lie, more often than not, overwhelming demands, postnatal depression, a childhood devoid of warmth, or a loss that was never properly mourned. Studies on postnatal depression describe its effects on early mother-child interaction, such as reduced eye contact and fewer responses to the infant’s cues. Mothers who are unable to show love have often never experienced it themselves. Understanding the mother does not undo the loss of the child.
The connection to the ‘replacement child’
One situation in which the ‘dead mother’ complex frequently arises is that of the ‘replacement child’. If a child is born after the death of a sibling, the mother may grieve for the first child whilst caring for the second. The second child lives with a shadow they do not recognise, and with the task of replacing a deceased child. Green’s description explains why these children often feel as though they are there and yet are not seen.
A connection can also be drawn to the family scapegoat, although this connection is a hypothesis and does not originate with Green: where a mother is emotionally absent, an unspoken loss remains within the family system, and it may be assigned to a child who acts it out vicariously.
Coping with a lack of maternal love: what helps
Psychoanalytic treatment seeks to put the ‘white grief’ into words. This requires a partner who remains present and engaged when emptiness, withdrawal and anger enter the relationship. The loss is acknowledged, and anger towards the mother is allowed to surface without the relationship breaking down. Attachment research describes a counterpart to this as ‘acquired security’: people with an insecure early attachment can, through later reliable relationships – including therapeutic ones – develop an attachment pattern that resembles the secure type. Psychotherapy is recommended when emptiness, depression, anxiety or relationship problems dominate everyday life.
Why the term resonates today
Search queries regarding a lack of maternal love are numerous, and they invariably mention the same things: long-term consequences in adulthood, symptoms, healing. Those who make these enquiries are usually seeking an explanation for a feeling they cannot put into words. Green’s text offers one that does not moralise. The experience is real, even if no specific event can be identified. It lies in the absence of something that ought to have been there, and that is why it is difficult to articulate. This is the reason for its persistence and for the emptiness described by those affected.
Key points in brief
• In 1980, Green described the ‘dead mother’: physically present, but emotionally absent, usually following a loss or a bout of depression.
• The child first tries to revive the mother, then withdraws and identifies with her absence. Green calls the result ‘white grief’.
• Adults describe a sense of emptiness, low self-esteem, fragile basic trust and fear of relationships, often without any specific event they can recall.
• Winnicott and the Still-Face experiment demonstrate the same sequence: an attempt to revive, withdrawal, and paralysis.
• The mother was usually trapped in grief herself. Green’s description does not accuse her.
• Therapy puts words to ‘white grief’, and reliable relationships later in life can foster a sense of security.
Sources and further reading
· Green, A. (1983): La mère morte. In: Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. English: The dead mother. In: On Private Madness (1986). London: Hogarth Press.
· Winnicott, D. W. (1956): Primary maternal preoccupation.
· Winnicott, D. W. (1967): ‘Mirror-role of mother and family in child development’.
· Tronick, E. et al. (1978): The infant’s response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-7138(09)62273-1
· Erikson, E. H. (1950): Childhood and Society.
Related
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Möchten Sie informiert werden, wenn ich einen neuen Blogbeitrag veröffentliche? Tragen Sie sich gern hier ein.
Klicken Sie auf „Kostenlos abonnieren“, wenn Sie meine Datenschutzerklärung gelesen und akzeptiert haben. Ihre Einwilligung können Sie jederzeit widerrufen.