A Maternal Type: the «Vulnerable Mother»

The maternal type that can be described as the «vulnerable mother» is characterized above all by the mother's victim-like presence: overwhelmed by everyday life, submerged by fatigue, by a paralyzing tiredness that holds her back and prevents her from living her motherhood serenely and enjoying it, because she feels compelled to take on the problems of everyone around her, even when her help is not requested.

The vulnerable mother, even though present and close to her child, instead of being perceived as a protective, reassuring person capable of instilling security, is experienced as a weak, fragile being, someone to be protected, to be comforted for the sufferings that people, or life's circumstances, have inflicted on her. She is a victim who often wants to sacrifice herself for her children even when it is not necessary. This attitude creates distress in the other, strong feelings of guilt, and great difficulty in breaking away from her even when they would like to.

The behavior of these «poor», suffering, dissatisfied, tired mothers is quite harmful to their children, because it unknowingly makes the mothers manipulative through guilt, unable to separate from their children, to recognize their individuality, to foster their autonomy. It reflects possessiveness toward the other, a lack of differentiation, a confusion between the child and themselves.

If we look more closely at the unconscious dimension, we come to understand that these women repeat with their children the behavior they themselves had, as little girls, toward their own mother, a mother from whom they had been unable to take their distance in order to assert their own personality and fulfill their own desires.

After becoming mothers, they feel at the mercy of their children just as they had been at the mercy of their own mother: both, in fact, exercise (or have exercised) a suffocating role over them, one that frustrates them but from which they cannot free themselves because of strong feelings of guilt.

What reveals this dynamic is the very same attitude these women show both toward their children and toward their own parents: trying to fulfill every request, expressing devotion and submission, they stifle themselves but not the inevitable aggressiveness they feel, which is paid for with feelings of guilt that cause symptoms, both psychic and somatic, sometimes quite intense. Recognizing themselves only in maternal or filial duty, which a severe (not to say sadistic) superego forces them to carry out without regard for their own desires, they live turned in on themselves and perpetually dissatisfied.

«Maternal vulnerability», which as noted is based on self-sacrifice and manifests as a kind of «heroic masochism», shares common features with the type of the «supermothers» described by the French psychoanalyst D. L. Haineault. Even though they may seem exemplary mothers, «supermothers» impose themselves through the violence of their anger and the intensity of their distress, which makes them possessive and intrusive. They are people who suffered a great deal during childhood, victims of narcissistic wounds that put their identity at risk, wounds they tend to try to make up for through motherhood.

As far as the child is concerned, experiencing maternal vulnerability makes separation more difficult, because it blocks aggressive expressions toward the mother and stirs up strong feelings of guilt. The child feels compelled to protect the «vulnerable mother», to stay close to her, not to break away from her. To do this, though, the child must stifle, inhibit, and block the physiological attempts to express the aggressive impulses aimed at separating from her. Being unable to separate from the mother affects the child's ability to be recognized (and thus to recognize themselves) in their own identity as a person, and this in turn affects their development and their ability to face their own life in a fulfilling way.