The Mother's Fear of Harming Her Baby

As Freud maintained, the difference between normality and pathology lies not so much in the quality of certain manifestations as in the frequency and intensity with which they occur: this means that, even when showing the same characteristics, they are not always the expression of a pathological state.

I am referring, for example, to the mother's fear of harming her baby. Every woman who becomes a mother experiences it, with different nuances but above all with different intensity.

There is nothing pathological about a woman who, lacking experience in caregiving, fears hurting her little one while carrying out everyday actions: changing him, dressing him, feeding him, washing him. Generally the initial sense of unfamiliarity toward the baby, from which the mother's fear stems, is replaced by the ability to "handle him" without apprehension, to the point of knowing how to hold him to soothe him when he cries or to help him fall asleep. Nor is it pathological when the thought sometimes crosses the mother's mind, faced with a helpless baby who is entirely dependent on her, that she could do "anything" to him, since he is unable to defend himself.

These are thoughts common to all women, which arise suddenly and disappear without any strategy being worked out to act on them or to suppress them.

Despite this, some mothers are deeply distressed by the sudden intrusion of thoughts of this kind, which appear abruptly, breaking with whatever they were thinking about, and which require a great deal of energy to keep at bay. They are frightened by what their mind produces, they feel guilty, they fear that these ideas (which they cannot stop ruminating on) might come true, so much so that, to protect themselves from dire consequences, they distance themselves from the baby, entrusting him to others as much as possible and avoiding taking care of him. This attitude obviously prevents them from enjoying the time spent together and affects the quality of the bond they build with the child.

In these cases, characterized by intense, continuous intrusive thoughts experienced as though the fears they express could actually come true, we speak of OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, which often requires drug therapy in addition to psychotherapy.

OCD is characterized by obsessions that create anxiety (from being the cause of aggressive attacks on the child to not being attentive enough to his safety) and by compulsions, that is, actions the person feels compelled to carry out to keep anxiety under control. For example, a mother who fears she might throw her child off a height, besides avoiding going out on the balcony with the baby in her arms, must constantly check that she has tightly closed all the windows in the house, as if building a barrier to protect him from an act she herself might commit. It is precisely thanks to precautions of this kind, however pathological their expression, that one can say the child runs no real risk beside a mother affected by OCD, who has no intention of harming him but fears she might, driven by forces she cannot control and from which she must protect him.