Interpreting the Infanticidal Mother’s Act

ABSTRACT

The reasons for maternal infanticide have rarely been approached. The absence of analysis leaves plenty of opportunity to maintain the assumption that the infanticidal mother is a mad or bad mother. Examining a mother’s possible motivations to kill her child from clinical, sociological, psychoanalytical, and political angles can decrease harm and perhaps help us to understand why maternal infanticide is an inevitable part of human life. Moreover, interpreting her act—asking, What does this mean?—can further illuminate what she needs.

KEY WORDS:

• Act of infanticide
• archetypes
• feminism
• infanticide
• Jung
• Medea
• motherhood
• postpartum
• psychosis

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

1. You can watch Zoe Caldwell’s performance as Medea on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdtDeZZ4RPk.

^2. The repression of the feminine principle also happens in men. In Western patriarchal societies, most men experience feminine qualities as foreign or shameful.

^3. In my research I found several images of the Whore of Babylon that bear a striking resemblance to representations of Medea. See Whore of Babylon, by Hans Burgkmair and William Blake; also Mlle Clairon as Medea, by Charles André van Loo; Medea, by S. van Abbé; and Medea, by Frederick Sandys.

^4. Examples of media articles include the following: “Woman Spitefully Texts Photo of Dead Toddler to Baby’s Father During Fight” (Essence, 2020); “Mom Accused of Killing Baby with Teaspoon of Salt to ‘Get Her Husband Back’” (Tribune Media Wire, 2016); “Va. Mom Who Killed Daughters in Plot to Exact Revenge on Husband, Then Called to Tell Him, Gets 78 Years” (People, 2023); “Gresham Woman Kills 2 Young Children, Herself in Midst of Custody Battle” (The Oregonian, 2021).

^5. The feminine seems unable to be freed of the cultural perception of her, as perpetrators of this type of retaliatory male filicide are sometimes described as suffering from a “Medea complex.”

^6. Fertility assistance is increasingly used by families in the West. Historically, if a mother couldn’t conceive, the only thing she could do was accept and mourn her condition and perhaps adopt. But now women can override these natural limits with IVF and surrogacy, thwarting what “mother nature had in mind.” Thus, it may be that abortion and infanticide reestablish the balance.

^7. If I meet a mother years after the infanticidal event, she often has come to a calm place of acceptance and reconciliation. She has a sense of honesty with herself and in our conversation; she is goal-oriented. If I meet her soon after the incident she is often in shock, unable to articulate her experience, and often in a state of dissociation, anger, or depression.

^8. Plato’s Timaeus compared a woman’s uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman’s body, “blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease” (King 1993, 25). He argued that the uterus is “sad and unfortunate” when it does not join with a male or bear a child (Tasca et al. 2012, 110).

^9. In his anti-Christian polemic The True Word, written between 170 and 180, the pagan philosopher Celsus declared that Mary Magdalene was “a hysterical female … who … likely, wanted to impress others by telling this fantastic tale, and so by this cock-and-bull story to provide a chance for other beggars” (Schaberg 2004, 84–85). Generations of envisioning, prophetic, and poetic women have been dismissed as insane heretics. Heretical women are part of my next project about women who had visions but who were silenced and lost in history: Sybl, Mary Magdalene, The Furies, Anne Sexton, Cassandra, St. Hildegard of Bingen, Lilith, Mary the Jewess, Mary Kemp, Julian of Norway, and more.

^10. In his work at Zürich’s Burghölzli Hospital, at the beginning of the modern era in Swiss psychiatry, Eugene Bleuler coined the term schizophrenia in 1911 to replace “dementia-praecox.” In 1907 while at Burghölzli Jung drew an association between the content of dreams and the content of hallucinations and delusions.

^11. My early work was with schizophrenia and psychosis. See Brooke Laufer, “Beyond Countertransference: Therapists’ Experiences in Clinical Relationships with Patients Diagnosed with Schizophrenia,” Psychosis: Psychological, Social, and Integrative Approaches 2, no. 2 (2010): 163–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/17522430902736893.

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. The two previous articles in Dr. Laufer’s series on the Death Mother archetype, “The Infanticidal Mother as the Speaking Subject” and “The Intersection of Systems in the Infanticidal Mother,” were published, respectively, in the Summer 2023 and Fall 2023 issues of Jung Journal. For more information, visit www.drbrookelaufer.com. Correspondence: [email protected].