The Intersection of Systems in the Infanticidal Mother

ABSTRACT

The infanticidal mother is not a singular event but a person affected and constructed by intersecting systems. Mothers who commit infanticide often have disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, are socially isolated, are full-time caregivers, are women of color, and are victims of domestic violence. Furthermore, an infanticidal mother has crucial experiences with the police and the law that crystalize her identity. All of these factors—class, race, relationship status, police, law—are essential to consider when dissecting the construction of the infanticidal mother. Familiarity with the intersecting institutional powers can help in the way we treat and prevent infanticide.

KEY WORDS:

• battered women
• feminism
• infanticide
• law
• motherhood
• police
• racism

Notes

1. A note on fraternal filicide: Men who kill their children are more likely to kill older children, to be unemployed, to be facing separation from their spouse, to be abusing alcohol or drugs, to have their paternity questioned, or to view the child as an impediment to their career (Friedman and Resnick 2016; Resnick 1969). Familicide, in which both a partner and children are killed, is committed almost exclusively by men. Researchers suggest this indicates that men are more likely to have proprietary attitudes to both women and children, whereas women primarily feel possessive toward children (Walklate and Petrie 2013). Moreover, men’s motives tend to differ from women’s for killing their children (they include scorn, embarrassment, and revenge)—this will be addressed in the next article of the series.

2. For a brilliant analysis of the evolutionary science of infanticide, see Daniela Sieff’s important work on the subject: “The Death Mother as Nature’s Shadow: Infanticide, Abandonment and the Collective Unconscious” (2019); and “Confronting Death Mother—An Interview with Marion Woodman” (2009).

3. Infants of Asian/Pacific Islander mothers had the lowest homicide rate (3.1) (Wilson et al., 2020).

4. I will further explore the experience of the Black mother as infanticidal in the US in the subsequent article (part 3 in this series).

5. In June 2022 in Maine a fifty-eight-year-old mother was arrested for the death of her baby in 1985, when it was discovered in a gravel pit. The police department used advances in DNA technology and genetic genealogy to identify Ms. Daigle. The police quote in the article: “This case was the culmination of decades worth of investigative work from dozens of now retired and current detectives who never gave up finding answers and justice for Baby Jane Doe” (Stelloh 2022).

6. See part 1 in this series, published in Jung Journal 17:3, for a longer discussion of the infanticidal mother as “other.”

7. Examination of the relationship between Law and God has been done by philosophers and historians perpetually, but a simple understanding I observed comes from Galatians 3:23–29, which roughly states: before Christ came, there was a disciplinarian law, which imprisoned and guarded us. Later, philosophers such as Nietzsche declared God was dead, and in the last hundred years there has been an undoing of monotheism. Thus, Law has returned in replacement of God. Maria Aristodemou elaborates on this in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Society (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brooke Laufer

Brooke Laufer, PsyD, is an independent scholar, writer, and clinician with a doctorate in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She has analytic training and a deep interest in motherhood, perinatal mood disorders, and infanticide. She serves as an expert witness specializing in cases of infanticide and maternal filicide. For more information, visit www.drbrookelaufer.com. Correspondence: [email protected].