Negative Mother Complex Writ Large?

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I have been thinking a lot about sexism, gender slurs and misogyny as the political campaign has unfolded. This morning I posted some thoughts here, spurred by references to a couple of articles. It seems clear to me that there is something operating in the cultural unconscious that allows  the things that Marie Cocco reports in the Washington Post the following, among others,:

"I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item."

Grouped together, as they are in her piece, the ugliness leaps out and makes one feel a little ill.

Judith Keller, in a piece in the Chicago Tribune, reminds us that this is 

" a familiar image in books, films, songs, comic books, TV series, video games and, now, politics: The woman as monster. The over-large, over-ambitious, overbearing creature who irritates everybody, the death-defying witch who just won't go away—and who therefore must be destroyed.

She's a vampire, a zombie, an alien, a werewolf, a psychopath, a serial killer. She's Alex, the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction" (1987), who ... keeps ... on ... coming. She's the looming, clutching, stifling mother or wife or girlfriend in a Philip Roth novel. (Which novel? Take your pick.) She's the eerie, outlandish creature in the Sylvia Plath poem "Lady Lazarus" (1965), who proclaims, "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." She's the vengeful giantess in the 1958 film "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman."

The relative absence of outrage and acceptance by commentators, pundits and ordinary men and women suggests that we may be in the grip of a cultural complex, an example of the negative mother complex on a large scale.

Today I ran across a short article by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, known to many as author of Women Who Run With The Wolves in which she to speculates that what we are seeing is the negative mother complex writ large --


The negative mother complex is as above, but also is understood as a sudden negative reaction to a woman in particular– that reminds a person in some way, consciously but more often unconsciously, of negative experiences with one’s earliest mother figure. A person caught in a negative mother complex projects that the stranger or known woman before them now, is somehow like ‘the old mother’… and lashes out in the present as they might have wished to long ago when they were smaller and powerless against, say, an unfair or self-centered mother, or an ineffectual, helpless mother.

In a woman, her tone of voice especially, but also a certain kind of unassailability, or a form of confidence or sureness about oneself, certain physical features, certain fragrances, certain words, a certain look in the eyes, a certain slant to the mouth… can act as triggers, setting off the negative mother complex in a person.

The complex does not allow the person to perceive or react to the woman before them as human, just as they did not see the early mother figure as human, but rather as spiteful, selfish, imperious, or impervious to them… among others reactions.

Cultures can carry and react with negative complexes also, sometimes carrying
unconscious desire to punish anyone reminding them of an earlier time when ‘the people’ had not ‘enough’ respect or notice or nourishment from a governmental source they depended on…

Now, large groups in the culture jump at innocent leaders just because they carry some words or tones or features that somehow remind of the time the people were badly mistreated or mal-nurtured by the previous regime… and more so, reminding the people of the worst: their own powerlessness to change that dark time or intervene in it.

None of this is to suggest that opposing Clinton is indicative of pathology, only that she has become a lightning rod for a negative mother complex that afflicts the culture as a whole, demonizing in particular powerful women. When this happens, the criticism becomes not of her behavior or policies, but become tinged with often violent imagery out of proportion to the actual behavior criticized.

That it is a complex and largely unconscious can be seen in its acceptance as just the way things are, with hardly a murmur raised to confront it. Indeed, to raise the issue is to run the risk of being attacked for "playing the gender card" as if gender were not a significant issue.

Cocco concludes:

There are many reasons Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.



May 17, 2008 4:14 PM

© Cheryl Fuller, 2007. All  rights reserved.