For a child's psychic development, the relationship he builds with his mother is essential. If the mother's presence is lacking in quality, the child can develop a sort of depression, often not recognized as such, which can lead, in adulthood, to a specific syndrome, "white psychosis". This is an atypical psychosis, which does not manifest through delusion or depression, but through a paralysis of thought, a sense of emptiness, of "having a hole inside".

The French psychoanalyst Green examines the causes of this condition in an essay entitled "The Dead Mother". In reality the mother he writes about is not dead, but distant, as if she were not there, and cares for the child "without putting her heart into it", because she is entirely absorbed by other issues on which her attention and her feelings are focused.

This means that, even if the mother is physically present but psychologically distant, the child unconsciously senses that he cannot rely on her, because she is there but it is as if she were not. This usually happens after the child has already experienced a good relationship with the mother. Then, however, this changes because an unforeseen situation (such as a real or symbolic bereavement, or the absence, the distance, the loss of a loved one) comes to trouble the mother. Her deep sadness and distraction are reflected in a decline in her interest in the little one, who may feel the anguished sensation of having lost her for good.

Unable to find an explanation for this change, often a sudden one, he experiences it as a genuine catastrophe, for which he feels guilty, believing it may have been caused by his own behavior.

Two phases can be identified in this state of distress:

  • the first, marked by anxiety, in which the child tries to fight to avoid losing his mother, seeking her out and calling her back into the relationship through every bodily means available to him: refusing food, gastrointestinal disturbances, sleep problems, unyielding oppositional behavior;
  • the second, in which the depressive state appears, marked by regression or the loss of skills already acquired in the various areas of emotional, cognitive, and physical development. The child shows a significant delay in reaching important milestones such as smiling at a human face, following an object with his eyes, and so on.

Faced with the mother's emotional withdrawal, the child at first fights, then withdraws his own investment from the object (the mother), and finally, unable to win her back, identifies with her, that is, tries to become as she is. He would be inclined to let himself die, and, unable to direct his aggression toward his weak and vulnerable mother, turns it instead toward someone else (father, a brother or sister), regarded as the presumed one responsible for the maternal depression, of which he is the victim.

The relationship with a "dead mother who is not dead" affects emotional investment to such an extent that people who experienced it in childhood often, during psychotherapy, express intense feelings of resentment toward some family member, felt to be their persecutor, the one responsible for all their childhood distress. As the work progresses, however, they come to realize that this person is only a screen behind which the mother is hidden. Worn out by an ambivalent relationship with that person, she was no longer able to invest emotionally in her other child, who, attributing his mother's withdrawal to his own bad behavior, lives overwhelmed by feelings of guilt that continue to shape his way of being even in adulthood.