[The dead mother].

Abstract

This study is not concerned, as the title might suggest, with the actual death of the mother but with the child's experience of a mother who is physically present but internally absent due to depression. The child simultaneously introjects and splits off the mother imago, making mourning and "burial" equally impossible. The consequence of this cathectic deprivation is what the author calls "psychic holes" or "white depression". Green attributes to the dead mother a similar structuring function for the psychic apparatus to that attributed to the dead father in Freud's Totem and Taboo, and places the dead mother complex side by side with the Oedipus complex.

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