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  • Motherhood as a matter of choice : what does psychoanalysis say about this? : [predavanje na] M(o)ther trouble Conference, Birkbeck, University of London, 30. - 31. May 2009
    Salecl, Renata
    Psychoanalysis recognizes that a person's decision to have children has many layers which cannot be at all explained with help of the vocabulary used by the rational choice theory. First of all, ... one's decision can be heavily influenced by one's parents. Behind a woman's or a man's desire to have a child it might very well be a desire or his or her mother or father. A son might thus present his child as some kind of a gift to his mother. A daughter might diminish the parenting role of her partner (the biological father) of the child by placing the grandfather in the role of the most powerful parentalauthority. A woman might also insist on having a child because she is trying to get a proof about what kind of an object of desire is she for her partner. She might say to her partner: "If you love me you will have a child with me." With such a demand, she is not expressing her own desire for a child but rather questions her partner's desire for her. Many people today are trying to rationally figure out what will be the best ways to conceive the child. The New York Times, for example, reported how women who search for sperm donors nowadays want all kinds of information about the donor (from his SAT scores, to his smile, body built etc.). However rational the choice of a woman for a particular donor might look like, this choice always involves intricate levels of her desire. A woman might pick a donor who resembles her father or her lost lover, or she might pick a donor so that she will not have any competition for the child's love. She might also pick a donor because this anonymous man will in a particular way be forever hers: since he is out of reach, the fantasy that she has about him will never be shattered by reality. Since the decision to become a mother involves so many layers of one's unconscious desire, for psychoanalysis it is also interesting to look at what kind of a fantasy about this desire an individual child creates in order to come to terms with his or her existence.
    Type of material - performed work (event) ; adult, serious
    Publication and manufacture - Birkbeck, 2009
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 1374030

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