Those of you are unfortunate enough to have fallen asleep to my videos time and again must have heard the phrase dead mother hundreds of times.
Dead mother is a phrase coined by the French psychoanalyst Andre Green in 1978, and it's the exact opposite of Donald Winnicott's good enough mother.
Andre Green's dead mother is a mother who is unable to fulfill her maternal roles and functions.
She's not a good mother, either because she's depressive or because she's emotionally absent or because she is remote or because she is selfish, narcissistic, or because she's psychopathic, or because she's abusive or because she's traumatizing or because or because.
It's a mother who is unable to function as a proper good enough mother and yes we are talking about mothers mothers only not fathers fathers come into the picture much later in life after age three or four the first 36 months of life, mother is the number one.
She forms, she is the formative influence. She molds the child. She creates the child.
Now, when I say mother, let it be clear, it has nothing to do with genitalia. Mother is anyone male or female who fulfills the maternal role or maternal roles.
So it could be a grandmother, could be a grandfather, could be a single father, could be. So anyone who in the first 36 months of life fulfills the maternal roles is the mother, the maternal figure.
And the dead mother is someone who fails consistently, repeatedly in actually meeting the needs of the emerging child.
This is the classic view of the dead mother.
In my work, the dead mother is cast a bit differently.
In my work, the dead mother absents not only herself, but she absents the child.
She does not recognize the child's separateness, externality, boundaries, emerging personal autonomy, independence. She doesn't allow the child to become self-efficacious, to have his or her own territory, internal space and external space.
She is overbearing in many ways and domineering via her absence.
So the dead mother is a double act of absence. She absents herself. She does not fulfill the maternal role within the dyad of mother child and she also absents the child by refusing to recognize the child as an individual the child becomes transparent she sees through the child as if a child were not there.
This kind of mother and as I said later in life father they abuse and traumatize the child but they abuse and traumatize the child by treating the child as an extension a prop an object. They objectified the child.
This kind of mother and later father may abuse the child physically, sexually, verbally, psychologically. These are the classic forms of abuse, but they may also be overprotective, possessive, overindulging, spoiling, pampering, instrumentalizing, and parentifying.
All these are forms of abuse. All these are abusive, counterintuitively, because we think that if a mother spoils a child and pampers a child, if a father is overprotective, they actually love the child.
That's not an expression of love, that's an expression of insecurity. The child is not allowed to become.
The child is not allowed to separate from the parental figures, form a nucleus, emerge a self, become an individual. The child is not allowed to separate an individual.
This kind of parents, mother to start with, may be devaluing, may be negating, but they may also be idealizing.
They may idolize the child, pedestalize the child, tell the child that he or she can do no wrong, that they're perfect.
That's abusive too.
In all these cases, the child is denied access to reality, and reality is the only engine of growth and personal development. The child is usually denied access to peers, and peers are not only sources of information, but points of reference. They're crucial to the evolution of the child especially much later in adolescence but also in early stages in the formative years
So parents who are overprotective, overindulging, parents who idealize the child, pedestalize the child, they're isolating the child in effect. This is a form of isolation.
They refuse to allow the child to find a substitute for the parents. For example, peers. They don't allow the child to develop object relations, relationships with other people outside the family, outside the parents.
They want to be the be all and end all as far as a child is concerned, a one-stop-shop solution. They don't want a child to outsource anything. They are there for the child, but they're there for the child exclusively, denying the child any ability to be confronted with alternatives and choices and to make decisions.
So, in other words, not allowing the child to emerge as an independent autonomous individual.
This breach of boundaries, because in the absence of contact with reality, in the absence of continuous, contiguous interaction with peers, there is no possibility for the establishment of boundaries.
The child is unable to form boundaries, to create them, let alone to enforce them. The child remains symbiotically attached and bonded to the parental figures, especially the mother.
He is unable to break loose, break free. He is unable to evolve away from the parents. He is unable to develop and grow.
So this kind of child is immersed in stunted growth, arrested development as it used to be called.
So it's very difficult for this kind of child to form a self, to constellate and integrate a sense of self, a core identity, to stabilize this kind of internal environment, to maintain a stable, regulated sense of self-worth from the inside.
This kind of child derives internal regulatory functions from the outside. He extracts regulation from the outside. This kind of child becomes performative. He performs in order to garner input, garner feedback, for example, narcissistic supply.
This kind of child seeks external regulation because he has learned to be reliant upon his mother and his father for feedback and regulation. So he needs external regulation and he fails to separate and individuate.
And this kind of child, having endured the dead mother, becomes a dead person, dead inside. And in some cases, unfortunately, dead dead outside. The rate of suicide among these kind of people is much much higher than in the general population.
So I just wanted to clarify this regarding the dead mother. She imposes her absence on the child. She absents the child. She teaches the child that to be absent is preferable to being present.
To negate and vitiate one's existence is a survival strategy which is much preferable to becoming or to existing. To be separate is dangerous. To be external is to be ignored. To have boundaries is both impudent and risky because the child may lose his parents.
The child is penalized. There's a punitive environment. The child is penalizedwhenever the child attempts to stray away from the parental figures, to become his or her own person, to develop personhood.
And so this kind of child learns to develop a core of absence, a non-entity, an empty schizoid core. That's the famous emptiness in mental health disorders such as borderline, schizoid narcissism, and so on.
This kind of child learns to never separate.
So this kind of child, when it grows up, becomes clingy and needy and dependent, insecure attachment style, and so on. This kind of child has severe difficulty telling the external from the internal, and he tends to internalize everything external in order to maintain mastery and control.
And this kind of child has no boundaries. He's unboundaried. He's unboundaried with himself, but he's unboundaried with other people too.
This whole situation is a breach of boundaries. A dead mother, dead parental figures, they breach boundaries. And they breach boundaries not occasionally, haphazardly, accidentally. They breach boundaries as a policy. They equate boundaries with evil, with the rebellion, with defiance.
So the message is, if you are trying to draw away from us, we who love you, your mother, your father, you're trying to draw away from us, you're trying to set limits where we stop and you begin, you establish boundaries, you're trying to interact with other people, prefer other people to us that is betrayal.
The child develops extreme guilt and shame and it's a double-edged sword because the shame is there is a duality of shame. Shame for having failed to become, for having failed to self-actualize, for having failed to realize your potential as a human being, and shame for having betrayed the introjects, the internal objects that represent the parental figures, for having betrayed your parents.
And of course these two types of shame are mutually exclusive. Because if you were to remain loyal and faithful to your parents, the price is to betray yourself, to not allow yourself to become, to not allow yourself to be.
And if you were to become, if you were to be loyal and faithful and authentic to yourself, the price is the betrayal of your parents. You have to choose between your parents and your authentic self. This is the choice that these kind of children face.
Inevitably, many of them, some of them, not many of them, end up with mental health disorders, among them, pathological narcissism and the extreme form narcissistic personality disorder.
There are therefore two developmental pathways to narcissistic personality disorder.
One developmental pathway involves adverse childhood experiences, and the other developmental path involves the objectification of the child, denial of boundaries, inability to separate and individual.
And both these paths, developmental paths, lead ultimately to narcissism, pathological narcissism and other mental health disorders, not only pathological narcissists.
Parents who are incapable of functioning out of a base of security, out of a sense of security, parents who are insecure can never become a secure base.
If the parent is afraid to lose the child, the parent will never allow the child to walk away. If the parent is a narcissist, the parent will not allow the child to challenge him or her by becoming an individual. Because an individualized child, a child who has become his or her own person, can challenge the parent. And a narcissistic parent would never allow this.
The mental health pathology of the parent, of the dysfunctional parent, I'm sorry, of the dysfunctional parent, of the dead mother, later the dead father, these mental health pathologies translate into parenting styles that deny the very essence of the child at such an early stage that the child grows up into not being.
The child not only denies its authentic self, the child denies any self, any being, any existence, and any boundaries just to placate the parental figures, alive, dead, or inside him as introjects.
Again, the choice is always between, I want to be me, I want to be my own person, I want to be an individual, I want to have my own life, and I need to gratify my parents, because otherwise they will abandon me and I will die. I need to gratify them. I need to cater to their wishes and their needs, however, deformed and distorted and thwarted and pathological.
And this is the choice this kind of person faces to the day he dies, because the parental figures are internalized, interjected, and the person incorporates them. They're never gone. They're always there. And they always shame the person. They always guilt trip the person.
Whenever this kind of person tries to have a life, tries to get married, have children, find a job, whatever, have a hobby, whatever. Any hint, any spark of autonomy, personal autonomy, independence, agency is immediately frowned upon by these internalized parental figures and they threaten abandonment.
They say, you have betrayed us and now we're going to walk away and you're going to be left all alone in the world because you have no existence without us. We are your existence. And you know it. You know that we have not allowed you to become. And so you are nothing but our reflection. You're nothing but our extension.
If we were to desert you, if we were to divorce you if we were to walk away what would be left nothing not even a memory.