The Mother

The Mother arrests the body in being encoded within the oedipal fantasm of non-separation, of unity, of wholeness and holiness. The Mother is a fantasm by which man/woman cannot come to enjoy in the body; there is only desire to possess, only desire, but no enjoyment.

The fantasm binds the subject to its world by means of objet a, the evasive residue of a lost object, substituting for the lost mother, our first loss. The fantasm of the Mother, that is, of the lost object retrieved, fills in the subject’s lack: it heals, nourishes and smoothes; it creates a world of pre-oedipal bliss, without paranoia, free of struggle as the fantasmatic relation to the Mother reflects the silent symbiosis of the mirror stage.

In claiming that the Mother is the fantasm of a lost unity and hence the objet a, a metonymical object of desire substituting for the subject’s unity, there is also the claim that the subject in its fantasmatic relation to the Mother eroticizes her, thereby turning the notion of the Mother into a fetish. That is to say, unless the Mother be recognized as a body Other to both herself and to the desiring subject. But then, the Mother is no longer the Mother, but a body in her own right, speaking and mortal, a speaking body.