JACQUES LACAN by Massimo Recalcati (II)

Le mani della madre / The hands of the mother

In psychoanalysis, there are two major mythologies surrounding the mother. The first conceives the mother as a prison: an omnipotent, engulfing figure from whom the father must liberate the child by introducing the law. The second idealizes motherhood as absolute love, sacrifice without remainder, total exclusivity. Both readings, though apparently opposed, share the same mistake: treating motherhood as a natural destiny rather than as an ethical position in relation to desire.

Lacan is radical on this point: there is no love for life, just as there is no love for the universal. There is only love one by one. Love for the proper name. To love is not to guarantee everything, but to recognize the other’s singularity without appropriating it. From here, Recalcati proposes a decisive inversion: it is not the father who must free the child from the mother, but the mother who, from the outset, must consent to not appropriating the child as an object of her jouissance.

Motherhood is neither domination nor fusion; it is, above all, an experience of waiting. A radical waiting, impossible to anticipate, which implies accepting that the child does not belong, does not fill, does not repair. When the mother confuses the child with the object meant to suture her lack, a silent violence begins: the child ceases to be a subject and becomes a function of maternal desire.

The desire of man — says Lacan — is always the desire of the Other. The desire to be recognized by the Other, the desire of the desire of the Other. When the child is not seen, when they are not recognized as a separate subject, an early form of narcissism appears: the child looks at themselves for hours in the mirror, not out of vanity, but out of hunger for a gaze. Today, that mirror has shifted to the screen. Not to record an image, but to sustain a mediated vision of oneself: to exist is to be seen, even if by no one.

This is where what psychoanalysis calls primary perversion comes into play. Not as a moral pathology, but as a structural risk: without the law of castration, the mother may substitute the child for the object of her desire. Lacan formulates this with a brutal image: the crocodile mother. One of her jaws is motherhood; the other, her femininity. The stick that prevents the child from being devoured is the law of castration — not to repress desire, but to limit it.

In the narcissistic mother, motherhood appears as a threat to femininity. The body changes, desire shifts, and sexual attraction no longer occupies the center. Instead of accepting this loss, the mother may attempt to annul it by appropriating the child. Here emerges the Medea complex: not as revenge against the father, but as a desperate attempt to turn time back, to restore an imagined femininity through the sacrifice of the child.

Recalcati finds a contemporary formulation of this tension in Mommy (Xavier Dolan): a mother caught between the crocodile mother and the narcissistic mother. A woman who sacrifices the Mother, until she recognizes that she cannot — and must not — cover all the needs of a child who has lost all symbolic stability. This is not insufficient love, but the limit of love itself.

The decisive question, then, is not whether the mother loves or does not love, but another, far more uncomfortable one: what has the child been for the desire of the mother?

In Il Ravage, Recalcati addresses the feminine failure of inheritance. The daughter demands from the mother the key to femininity, but every mother lacks that key. There is no direct transmission, no complete model. Femininity is not inherited: it is invented, lost, sought. Where the mother promises what she does not have, the damage multiplies.

Psychoanalysis does not accuse the mother, but neither does it absolve her. It points to an ethical demand: consenting to lack. Allowing the child not to fill, not to repair, not to guarantee anything. Only then can a desire emerge that is not deadly. Only then does love cease to be captive and finally become a relationship.