The Single Mother

When we speak of a "mother alone", we are referring to situations with very different characteristics from one another. Besides the unmarried mother, one also thinks of the mother who, though part of a "regular" family, experiences a depressive state after giving birth that affects and impoverishes the quality of her emotional relationships, giving her the feeling that they are nonexistent; or of the mother who has been brought to this situation by circumstances in life she would not have chosen: the end of the relationship with her partner due to the breakup of the bond or his death. These situations are experienced with great suffering by the woman, who finds herself facing a period of inevitable change due to the birth of the baby under conditions of great emotional fragility, a fragility that shows itself even more in the postpartum period than during pregnancy. In this period, when she lacks the chance to feel cared for and supported by her partner both psychologically and practically, even the baby's presence, however loved and wanted, can become a source of intense pain, since it reawakens the memory of dreams that did not come true and/or the longing for the loss of a person who is no longer there and whom she would have wanted close to her.

But it is above all the unmarried mother we want to focus on here, the woman who decides to bring a child into the world and raise him without a partner.

Today an increasing number of women are making this choice, often because they see time running out and do not want to lose the chance of having a child, even though they have not managed to build a satisfying, lasting relationship. To fulfill this desire they turn to assisted reproduction or seek pregnancy with a casual partner, or with one who refuses to take on the responsibilities that fatherhood entails.

But what drives a woman to have a child "alone"?

Beyond the rational reasons that justify this choice, it would be worth exploring what unconscious desires lie behind it.

If for anyone procreation is linked to the desire to survive one's own death through the continuation of one's DNA, other desires support it as well. First among them is the desire to return to one's own childhood, to repeat experiences of fulfillment or to try, through identification with the child, to overcome experiences of frustration that were never worked through.

For example, one might hypothesize that in those who make this choice, unconscious experiences from early childhood have resurfaced, characterized by a strong narcissistic desire for sexual completeness, that is, to be man and woman at the same time, and thus to be able to have a child alone too. In reality, the other is "used" only for the "technical" aspect, to achieve the result, and is then considered entirely unnecessary.

These mothers, however, risk forgetting that the egg/embryo/fetus/child is not, as they would like, "the missing part" of themselves, as they often seem to suggest through their behavior, but is genetically made up, for half, of that other person whom they erase: he or she is therefore a being with a specific identity of his or her own, one they often refuse to recognize.

The greatest danger involved in raising a child alone, regardless of the choice to have wanted him even without a partner, lies precisely in how easily a symbiotic bond with the child can form, in "absorbing" him psychologically, in not allowing him to leave the fusional stage.

This is precisely the purpose served by the figure of the father: to help the child move beyond the narrow confines of the maternal dyad, as necessary as it is during the first months of life and as suffocating as it can later become if a third person does not enter it.