The role of the childhood self in women's experiences of early motherhood.

Abstract

Using a clinical, multiple case-study research design, this study focuses on two questions: What aspects of a woman's past experience and current inner life determine the nature of the relationship she forms with her young child--particularly her capacity to empathize with her child's subjective experiences and with his dependence on herself? And, in what ways does this relationship affect the mother's psychic life and development? This is a longitudinal study, in which twelve women were individually interviewed at length when they were pregnant with their first child, and again when these first-born children were three-and-a-half years old. The interviews focused on the evolution of each woman's relationship with her child, on her own experiences as a child and the ways in which she felt the presence and influence of those experiences in her current life, and on the ways in which she felt changed by motherhood. It was found that a woman's capacity to empathize with her child--particularly with his need of her--was closely related to her contact with and empathy for her own childhood experiences and dependency. Furthermore, a woman's empathy for her own childhood self appeared to mediate not only her relationship with her child, but also her openness to being changed by that relationship. Close relationship to a young child invited women to become far more permeable to subjective experience, including the experience of instinct, affect, and imagination. For many subjects it stirred up sides of themselves which had previously been unconscious. While some subjects experienced this as a developmental opportunity and used it as such, others experienced it as a developmental threat against which they had to defend themselves. The level of ego strength at the time a woman became a mother emerged as a critical factor in determining whether or not motherhood initiated new development. Attention is given in the thesis to formulating the theoretical implications of the findings, and to presenting the different ways in which these phenomena manifested themselves in the lives of individual women.