Mother « Mireille

Mireille Eid

Mother

Everyone carries in himself an image of woman derived from the mother; by this he is determined to revere women generally, or to hold them in low esteem, or to be generally indifferent to them.
Nietzsche

Through the mangroves
I give birth
And choke on an aerial root
The size of an umbilical cord.
Mireille Eid

“I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.”
Julia Kristeva

Are mothers to blame?
Susan Maushart

““At that point, I had my subject. I was going to express what I felt towards her….First of all I cut her head, and slit her throat ….And after weeks of work, I thought, if this is the way I saw my mother, then she did not like me….What you do to a person has nothing to do with what you expect the person to feel toward you…. Now at the end I became very depressed, terribly, terribly depressed.”
Louise Bourgeois

My Mother.
Georges Bataille 1897-1962
translated from the French by Austryn Wainhouse.
London, Cape, 1972.

“Mother and Child” is an artwork by Mona Hatoum consisting of two chairs which have an unequal but inescapable relationship. They are angular, cold, and cage-like symbolising an entrapment, but at the same time there’s a symbiotic relationship between them because they are similar. They are facing each other and positioned too close for comfort. If one were to imagine people sitting on them, the body on the large chair representing the mother, would simply engulf or squash the person sitting on the small chair representing the child.

In Freud’s understanding, the girl’s oe dipus complex must ensure that she relinquishes her primary libidinal attachement to the mother in order eventually to take her father as love object.
Elizabeth Grosz


My mother and I.
Margaret Powell 1907-1984.
London, Pan Books, 1974.


In several works Teresa Brennan examines how, contrary to social notions of the separate and contained self, all that exists in the natural work is connected energetically. She identifies a “foundational fantasy” whereby the ego comes into existence and is maintained by the notion that it controls the mother. The effects of this fantasy are socially oppressive and, in the technological era, environmentally disastrous. My examination of narratives and images in ancient myth, popular culture, literature, and art suggest ways to counteract the destructive fantasy through resymbolization of the relation to what Brennan understands as the original/living nature, which is correlated to the mother’s body.
Jane Caputi, "On the Lap of Necessity: A Mythic Reading of Teresa Brennan’s Energetics Philosophy" ,Hypatia(2001) 16(2): 1-26


The “Virgin Mother – Mother of God”
The Bible


The mother’s body has been concealed in western religion, and to reveal her, changes religious belief.
Luce Irigaray


Families in the state of nature lacked fathers and attaching men to the more primary mother-child unit continues to be a problem in civil society.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau


The purpose of the work is to review the infertility options, as well as the associated risks to the neonate, mother and family of supermultiples. We undergo ethical and economic analysis from the medical and societal perspectives. We conclude that prevention of supermultiples should be a primary objective. This would reduce the need to consider selective reduction and the potential harm to the neonate and family from extreme prematurity. This could be done either through responsible utilization of ovarian stimulation or by more IVF. The cost of infertility treatment should be considered from the entire treatment cycle, which includes neonatal care. Infertility Treatment and Neonatal Care: The Ethical Obligation to Transcend Specialty Practice in the Interest of Reducing Multiple Births.
Steven Leuthner; Gladys White, In Journal-of-Clinical-Ethics. Fall 01; 12(3): 223-230.

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