Entre a mulher e a mãe: reflexões sobre a vulnerabilidade psíquica das mulheres no pós-parto

Abstract

This thesis arises from concerns that arose from the researcher psychoanalytic clinic practice, more specifically, about women in the puerperal state and during the first years of the baby's life, as well as the literature produced on this subject. It has been observed that the clinical testimony contrasts strongly with the premise disseminated by psychoanalytic societies that for Sigmund Freud the woman reaches its femininity and she feels realized as woman when she becomes mother. The present thesis, therefore, discusses both the Freudian premise that supposes to be equivalent the mother and the woman, collaborating to establish a normative model of mother, as well as, investigate in literature from various perspectives, the debate about the idealization of motherhood, which appears as one of the constructs that make the puerperium a period of intense psychic vulnerability. The main hypothesis is that the postpartum psychic vulnerability corresponds to a maternal psychological state proper to contemporary western societies. Starting from this hypothesis, the researcher seeks to identify what Freudian psychoanalysis offers for such reflection. For this discussion five discourses are focused: a) the place that the mother and the woman occupy in the Freudian theory, taking into account selected works of Sigmund Freud on the feminine and the hysteria; b) the place of mother and woman in the history of psychoanalysis, based on the french historian Elisabeth Roudinesco and the french psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; c) the history of the myth of motherhood construction in western society, taking from the perspective of the french feminist historian Elisabeth Badinter; d) the sociological approach to motherhood, as it is approached by the american sociologist, feminist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow; e) the particularities of the maternal field that the Perinatal Psychology has brought to light; and, finally, f) the father's place in the perinatal context. This discussion is based on reflections that take into account the clinical experience. The clinical material that serves to the analysis proposed, however, comes from the literature itself and not from the researcher personal clinic. It is, therefore, a psychoanalytic research combined with bibliographic-based documentary research.