I am currently reading “Jocasta’s children” by Christiane Olivier and lately everyone around me talks (usually in bad terms) about motherhood. It makes me wonder why… But I won’t write about the book now. There are too many thoughts based on this book and the charming style of the apparently pop writing on very complicated concepts. What I want to explore a bit is Winnicot’s idea of the “good-enough mother”. Because I had too much Freud and Lacan lately, I need a break from the phallic fathers. For Winnicot the mother is not absent and she is not frustrating the child, she is the positive presence. The real question here is if Winnicot’s theoretization of the mother is positive or not. And I think not. The mother is important but she has no desire, she is not scary, she is not aggressive, she has no orgasms, she is just an objective presence, the good-enough mother. Running away from Lacan, I end up in a bigger trap: Winnicot’s mother is not a real woman, she is just another misogynist myth, a male phantasy, a beautiful ideal. The good enough mother is the source of ultimate blame for real mothers. Because no one can achieve the good-enough high standards that patriarchal cultures impose for women (where the mother is the only one responsible for child care). This social aspect is devastating for the individual mothers, for children and for society at large. The good-enough mother has to be repressed by society for her too much power, for the fear of infantile helplessness. Men deny their helplessness and construct their domination attitude towards the world and their heterosexuality, where the gender roles are kept imbalances and mothers are in control, just not to become too good and too powerful. The external ideal of the mother is the perfect patriarchal blame in the Oedipal travel. And that brings back Olivier’s book and what we still tend to forget: what about Jocasta’s desire for Oedipus?
