Maternal Memory and Lived Time

Alison Stone Maternal Memory and Lived Time Introduction In this article I aim to contribute to thinking about maternal subjectivity by exploring whether there is a distinctly maternal form of lived time. no page number as online text. and for citation to Raphael-Leff below This article is a revised version of Stone 2011, ch. 6. The notion of lived time – or temporality – with which I shall work derives largely from the phenomenological tradition in philosophy and the human sciences. Lived time or temporality is different from the objective time that is measured by clocks and that provides an impersonal, shared framework, composed of an unending sequence of moments or ‘nows’, in which we situate and catalogue events and chronicle the passage of history. Prior to objective time in our first-person lived experience is a different kind of time: time as we live it. We anticipate and project ourselves forwards in imagination into the future: we plan and undertake enterprises; we expect and hope for certain events, and await what may come; we relate to objects in terms of what we can potentially do with them; we relate to people by anticipating or awaiting what they may say and do. We also remember and re-enact the past; we look back towards what has been or gone before; we relate to objects in light of the history of their use, and to people in light of our memories of what they have done and said. Where our anticipation of possibilities and preservation of the past converge, we come to represent – to make present to ourselves – the people, objects, and contexts that surround us; we encounter them in a particular light as their prior meanings and future possibilities intersect. Future, past and present first and foremost exist for us, then, not as objective, mind-independent features of the world but as aspects of how we relate to the world around us – by anticipating, recollecting, representing it, and so on. Lived time is temporality: not a neutral, objective framework but our way of existing temporally. Whereas objective time is uniform and homogeneous, not all lived time is alike. Because lived time is a function of how we relate to the world, different ways of relating to the world will bring with them different modes of lived time. To give a famous illustration, Heidegger (([1927] 1962) distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic temporality (Zeitlichkeit). He argues that in authentic temporality I am principally oriented towards my future, actively taking responsibility for my undertakings, whereas in inauthentic temporality I principally orient myself towards the present, by which I let myself be passively swept along. Controversial as Heidegger’s distinction is, it illustrates the broader point that temporality (or lived time) is not uniform but can assume multiple forms. If there are different modes of lived time, then it makes sense to ask whether there is a distinctly maternal mode of lived time. Perhaps the mother’s caring relationship towards her child, or her relational position as mother-of-a-child, brings with it a particular ordering of the temporal aspects of her existence. For instance, if a mother has made care of her child central to her life, and if she cares by anticipating the child’s needs or nurturing the child’s ongoing development, then arguably she is orienting herself primarily towards what may come in the future. Amongst the theorists who have explored ways in which maternal subjectivity is structured by lived time are Julia Kristeva ([1979] 1995) and Lisa Baraitser (2008). In this article I shall offer my own interpretation of maternal time, while trying to integrate some of Kristeva’s and Baraitser’s important insights. I shall argue that maternal time is distinctly oriented towards the past, because the mother-child relation tends to prompt the mother to remember and reproduce her infantile and childhood relation with her own mother. Yet that relation dates from an archaic time – a pre-verbal, somatic time when the mother-as-a-child and her own mother were completely entwined and interdependent. This archaic time can never be fully integrated into the mother’s present life as an adult, whose experience is mediated by language and narrative constructions. Because the past resists full incorporation into the mother’s present, she remains oriented towards it, occupied with it and endeavouring to render it present. This makes maternal time distinctly past-oriented, or so I will suggest. I. Infancy Remembered and Forgotten According to the psychoanalytic theorist Joan Raphael-Leff, the transition to motherhood is apt to pull a mother back, in memory and fantasy, to her own infancy. This is because of the mother’s exposure to the baby’s raw feelings, [… and her] unremitting contact with the smell and feel of primal substances (amniotic fluid, lochia, colostrum, urine, faeces, breast milk, mucus, posset, etc.) implicitly absorbed from the mother’s own archaic carer’s childbearing body. These create an emotional undertow towards procedural memories of primary interaction, embedded in presymbolic experience […] (Raphael-Leff 2009 p??). The baby’s and young child’s unique smells, feels, and sounds prompt the mother to remember the smells, feels, and sounds that suffused her infancy and childhood with those who cared for her at that time. The mother’s relations with her infant and then child are marked by bodily closeness, non-verbal forms of communication, affective rawness, and a constant presence of basic somatic issues around such matters as food, sleep, and excretion. All this reminds the mother of her early body-to-body relation with her own carer. Moreover, here mothers are generally pulled back to remember their early relations with their own mothers (biological or social). For given the gendered division of child-caring labour, mothers were generally cared for in their early childhood by their own mothers or by other women as mother-substitutes, while usually their fathers were relatively distant, absent figures. It is to her early relationship with her own mother that the mother is generally drawn back. This reappearance of the infantile past can come as a shock to mothers in modern industrial societies, many of whom have had little previous contact with babies or young children (Miller 2005, p. 26), and whose memories of this early period have therefore had relatively little opportunity to surface. Whereas traditional societies offer myriad opportunities to work through these early issues [memories of childhood] in the presence of siblings, cousins and other babies, in small nuclear families many new parents have had little contact with babies until the arrival of their own. Experience thus remains … untapped and unprocessed until it erupts in the presence of this baby for whom the mother and/or father has full (and often, isolated) responsibility. (Raphael-Leff 2009 p??) Thus, the mother is provoked to remember her infancy and childhood with her own mother because, compared to most of her other adult experiences, her present experience of mothering is relatively similar in its bodily immediacy and raw affectivity to her early childhood with her own mother. This similarity matters because ‘remembering happens in the present, not in the past’ (Stern [1995] 1999, p. 181). We remember elements of the past in response to present-day events; so, without present-day contexts that recall infancy, it remains unretrieved – only to surge up suddenly, perhaps overwhelmingly, when one becomes a mother. Becoming a mother, then, tends to provoke mothers to remember their archaic past – their bodily, pre-verbal infancy – generally spent with their own mothers. Moreover, this remembering may prompt a mother to remember additional later strands of her childhood, which continued and built on that pre-verbal past. A mother’s whole history of relations with her own mother, and with other figures of her early life, may resurface with new vigour for her because that history has been reconnected with its archaic roots. However, a question arises here. If the past to which mothers are apt to return in memory is archaic and pre-verbal, then how is this past possibly to be brought back into adult memory? After all, all adults suffer to varying degrees from ‘infantile amnesia’ (infantile Amnesie), as Freud called it: the inability to remember much of our early years before the ages of six to eight (Freud [1905] 1977, pp. 89-91, [1916/17] 1975, pp. 236, 369). The fact of widespread infantile amnesia, then, appears to challenge the idea that remembrance of the archaic infantile past is a typical part of mothering. Why do we suffer from this amnesia? Not because of the lapse of time involved: 13-year-olds generally remember little from when they were three, while 53-year-olds can remember plenty from when they were 43. Rather, The transition from earlier to later childhood is key, not the length of time elapsed. Perhaps, then, the minds of young children are simply insufficiently developed to lay down memories. However, recent researchers have found that even very young infants can remember specific episodes in a non-verbal form. For example, when shown a particular action, an infant can reproduce it given appropriate cues for several months afterwards (Shaffer and Kipp 2010, p.316). Or, when an object is put away in a particular place, infants can often remember that place after a long period of time, as shown by their going to get the object (Bauer 1996, p.31). So even very young children do lay down memories of specific events – as Freud thought too (in his case, because he doubted that anything once registered by the mind could ever really be erased from it.; See Loewald 1980, p.151). Freud therefore sought an alternative explanation for infantile amnesia. He suggested that we do lay down and retain memories of early childhood (I speak of ‘early childhood’ to include infancy, treating these phases as continuous). Memories of this period are in principle available to us, according to Freud, but in practice they become concealed from us once we become older children and adults, due to ‘primal repression’. This, for Freud, consists of the repression of the Oedipus complex in males and of pre-Oedipal love for the mother in females. For Freud, then, ‘the beginnings of sexual life which are included in that [early] period have provided the motive for its being forgotten – [...] this forgetting, in fact, is an outcome of repression’ (Freud [1916/17] 1975, p.369). Since any memories of early childhood are liable to call to mind the prohibited early bond with the mother, the whole period must be forgotten. Freud also proposed a second account of infantile amnesia, which has proved more productive for later researchers influenced by cognitive-developmental psychology. On this second hypothesis, temporal ordering depends upon the development of consciousness or (in Freud’s later psychical topology) of the ego. In early childhood, before robust ego organisation has arisen, mental processes ‘are not ordered temporally [zeitlich geordnet], are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all’; they are timeless (zeitlos), Freud says in The Unconscious (see Freud [1915] 1984, p. 191). Older children can construct temporally ordered memories because they have become able to order events in a single, shared spatio-temporal world. But we have only very fragmentary memories relating to our earlier years because at that age we had no temporal framework under which to organise our experiences. Later psychologists have expanded on Freud’s second hypothesis, exploring further ways in which the cognitive structures under which we organise our experiences change qualitatively between early and later childhood. David Pillemer and Sheldon White and David Pillemer (1989) propose that early memories are laid down in non-narrative form: in non-verbal schemata of bodily actions and interactions which organise patterns of habitual behaviour; in schemata regulating the affective reactions with which we become disposed to respond to familiar situations; and in the form of generalised, diffuse images that comprise perceptual schemata, templates under which we become prone to organise our sensory perceptions. These schemata are non-verbal templates for organising our bodily actions, affective responses, and perceptions, and our memories are encoded within them so that, in early childhood, we remember events according to these general schemata. Between the ages of six and eight years, Pillemer and White (1989??) argue, our way of remembering comes to be thoroughly mediated by language and the categories it encodes, and by the publicly shared map of time and space in terms of which we now learn to narrate our pasts. Against this unified spatio-temporal map, children become able to remember unique episodes, because they can now index each episode to a unique time and place that identify it. In addition, children now learn to identify each episode by its chronological and causal relations to other unique episodes, effectively constructing narratives to link episodes together. These details need not be explicitly given with the memory in question, but they can in principle be supplied. Essentially, children’s early mode of storing memories – what the psychoanalytic thinker Hans Loewald calls the ‘primary memorial system’ – is succeeded by a ‘representational’ memory system (Loewald 1980, p.166). There are differences amongst cognitive-developmental psychologists regarding the nature of these two memory systems, variously described as perceptual, emotional, habitual, and behavioural memory; as against verbal, representational, narrative and explicit memory. When we remember explicitly we do not necessarily verbalise or narrate what we are remembering, but we could do so in principle. Explicit memory thus presupposes a background of narrative capacity. Pillemer and White (1989) (??) also propose that pre-verbal memories are generic, whereas explicit memories are of specific events or episodes (so that explicit memories are episodic). Since then, other researchers have found that even young infants can already remember specific episodes (see, for example, Bauer 1996). Partly on such grounds, Katherine Nelson proposes that the development of capacities for speech and narration marks the transition not to episodic but to autobiographical memory, in which we link diverse episodes together meaningfully, particularly in conversation and social interaction with others (Nelson 1993). One way to reconcile these disparate positions is to suppose that young children do remember episodes but not as unique episodes, since they remember these episodes only in the form of general schemata. The more children learn to construct narratives, the more they become able to remember these episodes in their uniqueness, by which time children are also well on the way towards autobiographical remembering. However we resolve these details, as a whole the transition between two different memory systems explains infantile amnesia because it means that we cannot use our later, explicit memory system to retrieve memory-traces that were originally laid down and stored in non-representational form. As a result, ‘memories that once were accessible become inaccessible over the course of development [...because] early memories [cannot be] “translated” into the later available verbal format that becomes the “currency” of episodic memory’ (Bauer 1996, p.37). To recover one’s early memories, one would have to recover them in the schematic, bodily, non-narrative character in which they were registered – but we cannot do this within our explicit memory system. However, this shows only that we cannot retrieve infantile memories in narrative terms, not that we can no longer retrieve them at all. For, ex hypothesi, explicit remembering is only one form of remembering; its other main form is bodily, habitual, emotional remembering, and we do retain access to memories of early childhood in this latter form. This is because we retain the primary memory system alongside the later explicit system: as Pillemer (1998, p. 905), amongst others, acknowledges, once the later system develops the two systems co-exist. Primary remembering does not cease to function and neither is it fully subsumed under explicit remembering. Instead, the former persists to at least some extent alongside the latter. If we routinely remember early childhood in bodily-affective form, though we seem largely to do so without recognising the fact, instead misunderstanding memory to be exclusively representational. We are prone to this misunderstanding because early memories ‘are not known or felt as memories’ (Pillemer and White 1989, p.59; my emphasis). Instead early memories are re-enacted directly in behaviour or feeling – after all, these memories consist of schemata for behaviour or for certain patterns of emotional reaction to given kinds of situation. As such, these memories can be retrieved only by being acted out or felt again in an immediate way. Melanie Klein speaks of our having ‘memories in feelings’ (Klein 1975, p.180), whilst the novelist Toni Morrison coins the verb ‘to rememory’: to remember the past only by and in repeating it (Morrison 1987; for exposition see Hirsch 1994, p.107). In reproducing a behavioural or emotional disposition we do not relate to the past as past. Instead we directly re-experience the past in the present, as if that past were immediately present. Perhaps this shows that, after all, when we reproduce early childhood schemata in this way we are not rightly classified as remembering them. Freud sometimes seems to take that view, as when he distinguishes ‘remembering’ (Erinnern) from ‘repeating’ (Wiederholen) – and both from ‘working through’ (Durcharbeiten), in his 1914 paper on these three phenomena (Freud [1914] 1953-74, vol. 12, pp. 147-56). To repeat, he contends here, is to re-enact the past in action or feeling without knowing that one is doing so. Someone who repeats ‘reproduces’ the forgotten past ‘not as a memory [als Erinnerung] but as an action [als Tat]; he repeats [wiederholt] it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it’. He ‘repeats instead of remembering’ (pp. 150-1; my emphasis). For instance, rather than explicitly recalling how my mother affected me on some long-past occasion, I might reproduce my reactions towards her towards my child, to whom I (mistakenly) assume that I am reacting directly. Freud is taking it that, to remember, one must implicitly take oneself to be remembering (as distinct from, say, perceiving or anticipating). In so doing one tacitly recognises that the events towards which one orients oneself, as remembered events, are in the past (die Vergangenheit), gone, no longer present. For Freud, therefore, remembering is integrally connected with the mourning-work of letting the past go. By completing this work, Freud suggests, I can become liberated from the past, becoming able to perceive and respond to the present in its own right; whereas if I repeat then I am unfree, my actions determined by my past. However, Freud’s restriction of remembering to explicit, narrative remembering is misleadingly narrow. As we have seen, young children do remember specific episodes under the schematic, bodily memory system, and this is rightly classed as remembering because it is how these children retain awareness of specific episodes – functionally, this mode of remembering prefigures the later memory system. And if this primary memory system persists into older childhood and adulthood (in the form of our repeating and re-enacting our earlier interactions and affective reactions), then adults too, in repeating, are remembering. So ‘there can be no question that both acting out […] and remembering “in the old manner” [that is, explicitly] are memorial processes’, Hans Loewald concludes (1980, p. 152). Repeating is a memorial process of an archaic, somatic kind. These considerations imply that we suffer from infantile amnesia only in a more limited form than it initially seemed: namely that we cannot verbalise or narrate much if anything of our early childhoods, although we can and routinely do reproduce behavioural, emotional and perceptual patterns dating from this early time. This means that there is no mystery about how mothers can remember their archaic past history with their own mothers – for we all do so all the time, albeit in implicit and reproductive form. Yet this leaves us with a new puzzle: In what sense can it now be said that mothers particularly or uniquely remember their infantile past? As we saw earlier, it is plausible that mothers do so – that the distinctive character of the present-day mother-child relation uniquely pulls the mother back towards the relational setting of her own infancy. However, if we all remember (reproduce) behavioural and emotional patterns from our infancy all the time, then what room is there for maternal experience to have a distinctive memorial character? To address this puzzle, let me suggest some ways in which mothers might tend to remember (reproduce) their past with their own mothers differently from the way in which adults generally remember (reproduce) that same past. Generally as adults, we do not remember (reproduce) our infancy in its thoroughly relational character – in respect of the infant’s constant being with the mother – nor in the immediate corporeality of these relations. In contrast, the mother’s distinctive present context of relentless, intimate caring for a pre-verbal infant prompts her to remember (reproduce) her own infantile past in these specific relational and immediately corporeal aspects. Once again, remembering happens in the present. What makes me remember past episode X is the present-day occurrence of episode Y; if Y is in some respect related or similar to X, then its occurrence prompts me to remember X. Conversely, if present-day events are very dissimilar to infantile events, then they will not prompt us to remember the latter. Now, in early childhood we exist with our mothers constantly; interaction between mother and child is relentless, intense, and bodily. The schemata that the young child lays down at this time generally schematise ways of being with the mother (or other carers; but, in practice, generally the mother and other females positioned as her extensions or supplements. On these schemata of being with the other, see Stern 1985). As we become older children and adults, it becomes less and less common for us to encounter other individuals either as being entwined bodily with us for all or much of the time, or as regulating our entire mode of experience and behaviour. But that is how infants and young children experience their mothers (and their other care-givers) – as an ever-present, regulatory, bodily context. Moreover, the impact of language and culture is such that our older and adult relations with others are rarely conducted on an immediately corporeal and drive-based level, as are those of infant with mother. Adult events and interactions can and do prompt us to reproduce patterns of behaviour and feeling laid down in early childhood – to make gestures or facial expressions learnt in infancy, or to enjoy foods or games that we enjoyed in infancy. In doing so we are reproducing schemata laid down within our archaic relations with our mothers. Generally, though, as adults, the different character of the relations that we now have with others – mediated by language and culture, with greater or lesser degrees of bodily distance – means that we are not prompted to reproduce these early schemata in the full relational and corporeal significance that they originally had for us. Their relational and immediately corporeal aspect remains largely dormant during our adulthood, because by and large our adult contexts do not evoke it. The mother’s interactions with her infant are an exception to this rule. As Raphael-Leff (2009) pointed out, the infant’s affects and impulses are raw and visceral; its constant bodily closeness to the mother re-introduces her to smells, sounds, and sensations (breast milk, spit-up) that adults do not normally encounter. This prompts the mother to reproduce behavioural and emotional schemata from her early childhood specifically as ways of being with the other, as ways of regulating and being utterly entwined with that other at a bodily level and of maintaining that entwinement at an ongoing, everyday level. The mother is prompted to re-enter a relational mode of existence, rather than – as we normally do in adulthood – reproducing patterns that were first laid down in a relational context without re-creating the fabric of that original relational context itself. Ordinarily, then, the adult present does not prompt us to reproduce the infantile past in the fullness of its utterly relational and bodily character. Mother-child relations are unusual in that they are liable to do just that. II. Reproducing the Infantile Past If the mother remembers her infantile relationships first and foremost by repeating them in her body, perceptions and affects, what, concretely, is this kind of remembering like? We can gain some insights into this from Rosemary Balsam’s article ‘The Mother Within the Mother’ (2000). In this she provides case studies of several mothers in therapy who tended to re-enact their own mothers’ patterns of behaviour and feeling with their babies, even as these mothers consciously strove to repudiate their own mothers. Balsam’s first study, Ms E, arrives for her session and feeds her baby boy in an elaborate ritual involving a huge towel and plastic sheet, because she doesn’t want to ‘mess it [the analytic session] up’ (Balsam 2000, p. 473). The feed completed, Ms E launches into what she wanted to discuss: her anger with her own mother who is insisting on buying new covers for all Ms E’s furniture. Ms E declares, ‘I hate covers of any kind over furniture! I believe in kids making a mess’. She seeks Balsam’s advice on how to stand up to her mother and assert her independence. On the one hand, with her towel and sheet ritual Ms E repeats the fastidious behaviour of her own internal mother (that is, her mother as Ms E remembers her – a figure informed by but not reducible to her real, empirical mother). ‘The forefront of the patient’s mind […] was largely occupied by her interactions with the baby, while an unconscious, interactive presence of childhood experience with her own mother was enacted in the office’, Balsam observes (2000, p.485). On the other hand, Ms E endeavours to repudiate her mother and the fastidious behaviour that (she feels) her mother still seeks to foist on her. She seeks to extricate herself from the internal mother invading her body. A second patient, Ms T, has bought her five-year-old daughter Alicia a set of Russian dolls, by doing so intending to take revenge on her own ‘mean’ mother who never bought her any dolls. But Ms T loses her temper with Alicia when she will not stop playing with the dolls, the clacking noise of which prevents Ms T from doing some marking. Enraged, Ms T ‘whips’ Alicia off to bed and throws the dolls in the bin, although she later relents and rescues them. It emerges during the therapeutic session that Ms T associates the doll-play with masturbatory fantasies – exploring the dolls’ contours, Alicia appears to be caressing her own sexuate body. Ms T then becomes furious that, despite her efforts to depart from (what she feels were) her own mother’s sexually punitive and ascetic attitudes and to safeguard Alicia’s capacity for pleasure, she has been helplessly re-enacting her own mother’s punitive behaviour. Both mothers remember their childhood relations with their own mothers by reliving those relations, re-enacting (what they remember to have been) their own mothers’ concerns with cleanliness and sexual modesty. Here it is interesting that Ms E and Ms T do not only relive their previous attitudes and feelings as children vis-à-vis their own mothers, but also re-enact the punitive behaviour that they remember their mothers displaying vis-à-vis themselves when they were children. How is this curious substitution of roles possible? An answer is suggested by the work of Daniel Stern (1985), who argues that mother and young child form a reciprocally interacting whole. The young child is constitutively with the mother or other carers (as we saw earlier), and therefore the child constantly reciprocates, imitates, and reproduces the mother’s actions, gestures, and responses towards him or her. Consequently, when the present-day mother-child relation reminds the mother of her past relation with her own mother, she is drawn back to re-inhabit her earlier relational position as one who reciprocates, mimics, and reproduces her own mother’s behaviour. Ironically, then, part of being reminded of being an infant is being prompted to re-enact (what is felt to be) the former behaviour of one’s own mother. As Stern explains: the mother’s stored memories or memorial fragments ... include both sides of her interaction … with her own mother when she was young: the parts that she experienced directly as a baby, while interacting with her mother, and the part of her mother’s experience of interacting with her that she experienced empathically (via imitation and primary identification). (Stern 1999, p.181; my emphasis) This kind of complex return to the infantile past helps the mother to care for her child, by assuming a psychical position in which she reproduces the caring actions that she remembers her own mother performing towards her when she was a young child. She comes to reproduce her own mother’s ‘idiom of care’ (Bollas 1987, p.32). As the present-day mother returns to this infantile configuration, though she not only returns to the side of it composed of her own mother’s past behaviour. In addition, she may well feel again as she used to feel about that behaviour by her own mother – in the case of Ms T and E, feeling punished, deprived, or restricted. As in these cases, returning to the infantile context of maternal regulation can cause mothers to feel overpowered and overwhelmed by their own remembered mothers. This can motivate mothers, confronted with the long-lost past, to repudiate it. Remembering (re-experiencing) their negative feelings about their own mothers, mothers often wish to mother differently to their own mothers and to allow their children freedoms that they feel their own mothers denied them. Ms E and T wish to be better mothers than their mothers: to be good mothers by distancing themselves from their own ‘bad’ mothers. They exemplify a pattern in which the present-day mother fends off her resurgent past by reasserting her autonomy and competence as a mother against the perceived failings of her own mother. In all this, we can see that when present-day mothering evokes memories of the past, it does so not as an external occasion that recalls a time intrinsically separate from the present. Instead, memories of the past are directly retrieved within the present mother-child relation in its immediacy and corporeality. The present calls up the past, which is re-enacted in, and as, the mother’s present-day body-to-body relation with her child – as when Ms E re-enacts her mother’s fastidiousness in the feeding ritual with her baby. Or, in an example of Stern’s, a mother playing face-to-face games with her baby daughter suddenly reproduces a face game that her own mother played with her twenty years ago – a game of which she has no explicit memory (Stern 1999, p.182). Likewise, old feelings transpose themselves into the present, so that, in holding her child in a certain way, a mother may feel again as she used to feel when her own mother held her. What is remembered here can only be remembered in being re-enacted and re-experienced, given its archaic character; and the present calls up this past by prompting us to re-enact it. What does all this imply regarding a possible maternal form of lived time? Insofar as the mother’s present-day relation to her child prompts that mother to remember (reproduce) her own past, it seems that the mother’s primary mode of relating to the world and to others within it, is one of remembering. It is on the basis of remembering the past, transposing it into the present, that she maintains her present-day relation with her child, and with other people and situations to the extent that her maternal attitudes pervade her mode of life generally. Since in remembering we direct ourselves towards the past, the mother’s lived time therefore seems to be past-centred, the past serving as its main organising dimension. Yet there are complications here. As we have seen, the mother only remembers (reproduces) her past by transferring it forward into the present, so that she does not turn away from the present towards the past, but remains focused on the present even as she remembers the past. In this situation, past and present transpose themselves onto one another to form an ‘organic unity’, as Maria Talero puts it, discussing psychoanalytic ideas of lived time (2004). Because past and present infuse one another to form a whole within which they inseparably entwine, it is not so obvious that the mother’s lived time is centred specifically on the past. Moreover, in transferring her past forward into her present, the mother arguably does nothing peculiarly maternal but merely engages in the activity of transference (Übertragung) that is constitutive of all human experience. For some psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Hans Loewald (1980, esp. pp. 143-4) and Nancy Chodorow in The Power of Feelings (1999), all our experience is constituted by the process of transference, as we reproduce our past relations with others in the present. On these grounds, Loewald maintains that the organic unity of lived time (to which Talero refers) is a feature of all lived time, and by implication is not specifically maternal. However, we saw earlier that there is something distinctive about the kind of remembering (reproducing) to which the mother’s situation prompts her. She is pulled back towards her archaic past. In the next section, I want to suggest that this gives rise to a distinctly maternal form of lived time. Generally lived time involves an organic unity of past and present, due to the role of transference in human life. But because the past that the mother transfers forward is archaic, it is asymmetrical with the present into which it is transferred. This past always retains an excess over the present – there is always more in this past than can possibly be incorporated into a present structured by language and narration. So whereas maternal lived time shares in the organic unity of all lived time, in the maternal case this organic unity is distinctly asymmetrical, and the past predominates within it. III. Kristeva and Women’s Time To understand how past and present, although organically united, are out of joint within maternal temporality, I want to return to Kristeva’s famous 1979 essay ‘Women’s Time’, later included in her book New Maladies of the Soul. In this essay she provides a still-insightful account of a ‘female’ (féminin) form of time. Kristeva provides this account in the context of identifying three phases of feminist activism: equality feminism, difference feminism, and a ‘third generation’ affirming the plurality, singularity, and internal complexity of female subjects. This idea of three waves of feminism – first, second, and third – has of course become very widely held amongst feminists. It is often assumed – as by some recent champions of ‘third wave’ feminism – that each stage improves on its predecessor(s). Kristeva, though, is not claiming that these phases comprise a progressive sequence. On the contrary, she is proposing a ‘conception of “feminine” time [that] puts into question the adequacy of thinking the story of feminism in terms of successive and mutually exclusive phases’, as Tina Chanter explains (1989, p.63). For Kristeva, to periodise feminist activism into progressive stages would be to understand it in terms of the linear, publicly shared form of time (objective time) by which we conventionally measure social and political progress. Kristeva takes it that this form of time – linear time – is our standard form of time in modernity. We see time as a line stretching infinitely in both directions – there is no conceivable first or last event – and infinitely divisible into hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, and so on ad infinitum. Linear time, Kristeva maintains, is symbolically masculine: it measures progress, change, action, negativity, and transcendence. To see feminist activism as a linear progression, then, would be to subject it exclusively to masculine parameters – inappropriately so. Instead, Kristeva wants to highlight alternative forms of time, and to re-interpret feminist activism in terms of two of these alternative forms of time – cyclical, or repetitive, time and eternal, or monumental, time. Kristeva brings together monumental and cyclical time and she identifies them as féminin (Kristeva [1979] 1995, p.205). On that basis, she concludes that feminism has not three sequential phases, but three aspects, each ever-present and equally necessary, and each periodically rising to prominence. My focus, though, is not on this view of feminism as such, but on the conception of monumental and cyclical time that underpins it. Monumental or eternal time, Kristeva suggests, does not pass. Paradoxically, it is static, timeless, ‘faultless and impenetrable [... It] has so little to do with linear time [which passes] that the very term “temporality” seems inappropriate’ (1995, p.205). In what way, then, is this a form of time? If timelessness is to become temporal, this can only be by entering into relation with linear time. Presumably, though, this must be the relation of standing outside linear time, unchanged, always the same. But precisely by standing constant outside of linear time as it ceaselessly passes, the eternally-same gains a temporal quality: that of cutting across linear time. Moreover, since linear time is composed of discrete moments, it is necessarily from certain distinct points within linear time that this constant presence of eternity becomes manifest and able to affect the progression of linear time. So the eternally-same appears at different points within linear time, in doing so breaking open the sequence of homogeneous moments, marking the beginning of a new epoch and the end of the preceding one. In this way timelessness introduces qualitative alterations into what would otherwise be an uninterrupted passage of moments. The periodic interruption of the ever-same creates qualitatively different eras within linear time. Although it is linear time that allows us to measure and index the periods, the intervals, at which the ever-same erupts, once we have these eruptions we can also divide linear time into different epochs. Each epoch in turn runs its course and is ended by a new interruption from the eternally-same, so that each epoch starts from the same point as its predecessor. Thus, the eternal as it acts upon and within linear time superimposes a new dimension upon it: that of cyclical time. This is why Kristeva brings eternity and cyclicity together. In calling eternal time ‘monumental’, Kristeva alludes to Nietzsche’s idea of monumental history (monumentalische Historie) in his Untimely Meditation on ‘The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, first published in 1874. Monumental history as Nietzsche conceives it – as one of several possible ways of doing history – presupposes a cyclical view of time. For Nietzsche, the monumental historian (at his best) finds peaks of human greatness in the past to inspire us to action and achievement today. From monumental history, the present-day individual ‘learns [...] that the greatness that once existed was [...] once possible and may thus be possible again’ (Nietzsche [1873-6] 1983, p.69; emphases from original). Long-past as great deeds were, we can re-create them in the present; the vast swathes of time that have elapsed in between need not prevent us from doing so. Great achievements may always re-animate linear time. Nietzsche also suggests that monumental historians incline to a mythic view of the great past (1983, p.70). To make the great deeds of the past more amenable to re-creation today, more capable of directly re-entering the present, the historian detaches them from chronological time and re-situates them in a mythic time before linear, recorded history. Classical heroes, such as Oedipus, inhabit a long-past age between myth and history, between the time of the immortal gods and the time of mortal humans. The Greeks celebrated this mythic past in rituals, especially tragic festivals, which re-enacted the past in the present so that it could inspire great actions. The mythic or ‘monumental’ past, then, is not merely situated at an early point on the line of chronological time but stands altogether outside this line, as mythic heroes stand outside of mundane history. Consequently, this monumental past can always become present by interrupting linear time to inaugurate a new beginning. Kristeva holds that cyclical and monumental time are ‘traditionally linked with female subjectivity [la subjectivité féminine] insofar as the latter is thought to be necessarily maternal’ (1995, p.205). Yet since women are not always mothers, ‘women’s’ time would be better called ‘maternal’ time. Even so, it is unclear how cyclical time, as Kristeva understands it, bears upon maternal experience other than symbolically – insofar as this form of time is associated with space and the female – or biologically – if maternal biology is understood to be cyclical and maternal subjectivity is reduced to an effect of this biology. Plausibly, though, women as mothers do have a particular relation to cyclical time – for psychical, not narrowly biological, reasons. In becoming a mother one comes to remember one’s infantile past with one’s own mother, a pre-verbal bodily past that can be remembered explicitly to a very limited extent. Instead that past is remembered corporeally and affectively, in implicit practice, in being re-enacted now between mother and child. Thus in mothering, the mother’s archaic past re-enters her present – a past that is archaic because it precedes the development of her ego and temporal organisation and of her capacities for speaking and narrating. Like the mythical or monumental past for the Greeks, the mother’s archaic past precedes the narrative line of her life. Yet the present-day mother is a speaking, narrating, representing individual. This means that the past that the mother re-experiences now comes to saturate her present existence without her being able fully to incorporate it into that present existence in which she speaks, represents, and constructs narratives. Her past pervades her present context, since she re-enacts it in practice, affect and perception; but equally her ways of acting, feeling and perceiving are now mediated by language and culture, so that the pre-verbal, directly somatic, rawly affective aspects of the past always exceed what can be brought forward from that past into the present context. Because the present-day perceptions, actions, and affections in which the mother re-creates the past are inescapably infused by language and culture, her past cannot be brought back into them in its full character and wealth. The past to which she is pulled back always retains this excess over her present, and this gives the past primacy within the mother’s lived time, as the dimension towards which she remains oriented. For her present context prompts her to strive to accommodate this past within her current, verbally structured experience, yet because of the alterity of this past she can never completely do so – so that the orientation towards the past remains. Lived maternal time is also cyclical in the sense identified by Kristeva, for whom time becomes cyclical when that which is eternal and timeless cuts across linear time to introduce a new phase within it. When a woman becomes a mother, her archaic past returns into her present-day experience, which, since her older childhood, has been structured by a linear form of time that goes hand-in-hand with language and narration. This return of the archaic past marks the beginning of a new phase within this linear time. This is the beginning of a new cycle, in which the mother cycles back to the archaic past, and that past re-appears within the present again. While the mother has already been through the relations of her infancy and childhood once, she now passes through them again in a second incarnation, as they become embodied between herself and her child. IV. Between Past and Future In her important study Maternal Encounters, Lisa Baraitser cautions us not to reduce the mother’s relational position to that of the daughter. She insists that we need to retain ‘a specifically maternal subjectivity. To fail to do so leaves the mother’s particular concerns and paradoxes hopelessly unarticulated’ (2008, p.10), and that the ‘looping of the mother back to her daughter position [...] enacts the disappearance of the maternal’ (2008???, p.51). Perhaps my idea of cyclical time accomplishes precisely this reduction of mother to daughter. Even though I see maternal time as distinctive in its movement of cycling back through the past once more – not simply duplicating the past as it was – this form of lived time is only possible because each mother is, and remains, a daughter, re-living her past with her own mother in her current relationship with her child. Baraitser could object that this does not allow for the radical alterity of child to mother – the status of ‘the post-birth child as radically Other’ (2008???, p. 45) – which makes the mother-child relation unique and thereby makes the mother a distinct kind of subject. For Baraitser, grasping maternal subjectivity in its specificity requires appreciating how mother-child relations differ irreducibly from the relations that mothers have, as daughters, to their own mothers. We need, she writes, ‘to understand maternal subjectivity as a fundamentally changed or transformed state’ (p. 52) – not simply one in which the past is reproduced. Moreover, for Baraitser, the mother’s unique relation to her child has temporal aspects. It is marked by constant interruption of her own durational experiences by the demands and needs of the child, who cannot wait. This disruption may bring the mother to an especially intense apprehension of, and dwelling in, the present moment (2008???, p.80). But, above all, for Baraitser, the mother as child-carer is constantly engaged in ‘facing what is beyond [her] own possibilities’ (2008???, p.43) – her concern is not for her own (future) possibilities, but for (future) possibilities that are even more radically other to her present, because they belong not to her future at all but to that of her child. As Rachel Cusk writes in her narrative of her transition to motherhood, A Life’s Work, ‘I see my daughter hurrying away from me, hurtling towards her future, and in that sight I recognise my ending, my frontier, the boundary of my life’ (2001, p. 206). Furthermore, a mother is oriented towards her child’s future possibilities in an especially profound sense, because the child is incomplete, unformed, full of possibilities but with an actual personality structure that remains unfinished and under construction. Using a phrase of Sara Ruddick’s, Baraitser calls the child an ‘“open structure” whose acts are irregular, unpredictable, often mysterious’ (2008, p.21). The mother is oriented towards the future possibilities of an other who is very largely composed of future possibilities and not present actualities. The mother’s uncomfortable subject-position, then, is one of orientation towards this uniquely inassimilable other. Now, whilst I agree with Baraitser that maternal subjectivity involves a distinctive form of lived time, I have identified this form of time as past-centred and cyclical. Baraitser’s work poses two related challenges to my view. The first is whether past-centred, cyclical time can accommodate anything of the orientation to the future, which Baraitser plausibly suggests is crucial to maternal subjectivity as child-caring subjectivity. The second challenge is whether we can see maternal time as past-centred without reducing the mother’s relational position to that of the daughter. I suggest that psychoanalytic ideas of transference and its relation to ‘deferred action’ (Nachträglichkeit) give us resources with which to respond to both challenges. In particular, we can reconsider the mother-child relation in light of the relation between analysand and analyst. Psychoanalysts have often used mothering to shed light on what the analyst does: containing, creating an analytic third, making creative use of hatred, and so on. Reversing this line of inquiry, we can ask: What light can the analytic encounter shed on the temporality of the mothering relation? Transference is at the heart of the analytic encounter and, as we saw earlier, it is an inherently temporal process, that of repeating the past in the present. The patient transfers her past relationships to others onto her relationship to the analyst, thereby also transferring onto the analyst both loving and hostile feelings as she formerly directed them to other people (ultimately, to her earliest carers). As Chodorow emphasises, though, transference does not occur only in therapy. Transference is the process by which all our experience acquires significance and affective vitality (Chodorow 1999, p. 23). Analysis only brings into sharp relief this feature of all experience. Furthermore, the analytic encounter reveals how we generally act, speak, and feel towards others on the basis of our largely unconscious expectations about those others – about how they will respond, act, receive our communications and gestures – expectations that are shaped by our pasts. I expect this other person, the analyst, to respond to me as I feel that successive others have done in the past. To have expectations and anticipations of others, though, is to relate to them in a futural mode. It is to relate to their possible actions, responses and words, by anticipating how these may come to unfold. However, insofar as I expect others to duplicate responses with which I have met in the past, I appear to be open to the future only so far as my past permits. Recent accounts of the analytic encounter complicate this picture. On these accounts, the meaning of the past that the patient carries forward into this encounter is created, in the encounter, by patient and analyst together. The analyst too brings something to the encounter: she reacts to how the patient positions and treats her in light of his past. At best, the analyst stays faithful to her own relational history and therefore reacts to the patient’s attributions in ways that the patient finds novel, unexpected, and surprising (see, especially, Bollas 1987). This unexpected behaviour does not jolt the patient out of their past into a pure present. Since the patient inevitably continues to relate to the analyst on the basis of her past, what happens is that the analyst’s unexpected behaviour triggers fresh memories on the patient’s part, prompting the patient to re-evaluate her past so that new elements and strands surface within it. Ultimately, over time, this process can change the whole content of the patient’s past. This ‘modification of the past by the present does not change “what objectively happened in the past”, but it changes that past which the patient carries within him as his living history’, Loewald remarks (1980, p. 144). Above all, the patient is prompted to remember different strands of her past in the form of reproducing and re-enacting them; she retrieves hitherto dormant practical and affective schemata by enacting them in response to the analyst. This may also prompt the patient to verbalise and narrate her past differently, to retrieve new memories at an explicit level. But, primarily, the change occurs at the level of bodily, practical, perceptual and affective memory rather than of explicit memory. It is not merely that we remember things differently whilst the actual past remains unaffected. The past itself, in a certain sense, changes. Freud grasps this in terms of his concept of Nachträglichkeit. As he wrote to Fliess in a letter of 6 December 1896: ‘the material present in the form of memory traces [Erinnerungsspuren] is [...] subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription’ (Freud 1954-73, vol. 1, p.233). Nachträglichkeit also, more specifically, denotes the process by which certain early events, primarily sexual events in early childhood, become traumatic only later on, after a child enters the symbolic order and deciphers the adult signifiers of sexuality that had been enigmatic to it. At this later point, these events retrospectively become traumatic. See Laplanche 1999. This kind of re-transcription (Umschrift) is possible because my interior past – the history, recorded in memory-traces, which is available to me – consists of my registrations of events in the significance that they intrinsically had for me. I have registered these events as inherently imbued with fantasy, links to other past events, idiosyncratic associations, etc. When I remember (reproduce) long-dormant elements from my personal past, I bring them into the present and thus place them into a new set of connections – new causal connections and new connections of emotional significance. This changes their significance for me; and this, by a ripple effect, changes the whole web of significance that connects and constitutes the elements in my personal past. My personal past, the whole store of registered history that is available for me to remember, changes. Analysis may at its best initiate this kind of change on the patient’s part, but in doing so it only highlights a general feature of all social encounters. My anticipation of the other cannot but fall short of what that other does, for the other is never reducible to my mental constructions. The other’s responses will always exceed my expectations, however minimally or imperceptibly. Confronted with someone who exceeds my expectations in this way, I continually shift my expectations and the memories that organise them so that I can continue to relate to the other. Precisely because my past structures my openness to the future, the surprises thrown up as the future unfolds continually prompt me to re-assess and amend my past. We can now appreciate more fully the psychoanalytic idea of the organic unity of temporal dimensions. Not only do past and present form an organic unity; so do past and future. Indeed, it is ultimately because of the organic unity of past and future that past and present also form an organic unity. For my present-day relationships are ones in which I continually anticipate and await the actions, words and gestures of the other and thus relate to the other in a futural mode. It is in response to what actually comes to pass that I revisit my past and transport it forward into the present. The lived present is thus the site where revisited past and anticipated future intersect. All this is true of lived time generally, however. How does it bear upon maternity specifically? I would like to explore this by turning to a story in Pat Barker’s 1982 book Union Street: the story of Lisa Goddard, a working-class mother of two sons, who has just given birth in hospital to her third child, her first daughter. Lisa’s newborn baby is not as she expected: ‘she had never really believed it would be [a girl]. She had not been ready for a girl’ (Barker 1982, p. 138). Lisa’s initial reaction is to reject the baby, radically: ‘she did not feel that she had given birth at all […] There was no baby there’ (1982, p.132). When the nurse brings her the baby, Lisa is forced to accept that this baby exists, but now she feels that the baby is not hers: ‘There was nothing about this baby she recognised as hers. If she had been an animal she would have rejected it, would have sniffed at it and turned away, at once and finally.’ (1982, p.133). Lisa’s space of prior expectations, her past inheritance, contains nothing permitting her to respond to the baby. Lisa is left staring at the baby as if the baby’s skin contained ‘a code that [Lisa] had to decipher or die’ (1982, p.136). Lisa has to find some way to bring the baby into her framework of expectations so that she can respond to the baby’s needs. Then something happens: Lisa finds a smear of blood on her baby’s vagina and is stricken with fear that the baby has a terrible disease. The nurse explains that it is only the normal effect of the baby ceasing to be exposed to the mother’s hormones: ‘well, in a way, it’s her first period’ (1982, p.137). Now Lisa looks at her baby with wonder. Lisa opens up to her on realising that her baby is female just as Lisa is, and will menstruate and be able to give birth. ‘That little rounded stomach! […] How strange that under that soft flesh there should be already be muscles as strong as those which had thrust it into the world […] inside that tiny body was a womb like hers with eggs waiting to be released’ (pp. 137-8). This realisation creates a way for Lisa to relate to her baby – as a same-sexed being, who will in all likelihood become a mother just like Lisa. Now able to care for and nurture her baby – and, only now, to name her Katherine – Lisa goes into a reverie while she is breast-feeding the baby. Lisa remembers a day ‘back in her childhood’ when she and her brothers indulged in an ‘orgy of destruction’ on the moors near her childhood home, walking miles gathering birds’ eggs and then smashing them. ‘And she had shouted and screamed and smashed harder than any of them’ (1982, p.139). As she remembers this episode, Lisa is realising that (despite having already had two sons) she has long been engaged in rejecting her own birth – her physical birth and her psychical birth facilitated by her own mother’s care – a rejection symbolised by her smashing of the birds’ eggs. Lisa has been prompted to realise this as she imagines the eggs contained inside her newborn daughter. For just as Katherine will one day become able to give birth, reciprocally Lisa was not always a mother but was once the daughter of her own mother, dependent upon her mother’s care. Katherine’s birth prompts Lisa to revisit her own childhood dependency, in the process recognising that she has been rejecting it, and in doing so beginning to move beyond this same rejection. Lisa is continuing to relate to her daughter on the basis of her own past. But the unexpected future that has unfolded, that of the birth of a girl, has prompted Lisa to draw upon aspects of her past that have long been dormant: her status as a girl-child, born of her own mother, and who began life within a context of maternal body relations. Lisa has long been relating to others, especially her sons, on the model of her idealised elder brothers, to whose freedom she aspired as a girl. She now remembers this aspiration differently and less favourably, as having rested upon an aggressive rejection of her maternal past. Katherine affects Lisa as (ideally) the analyst affects the patient: by confronting her with something new and unexpected that prompts the patient to unearth neglected strata of her history. As Lisa Goddard’s case shows, the mother can be open to her child only based on her past. Having long identified with her brothers and having already had two sons, Lisa expected another son. Yet the future that came to pass did not fit in with this expectation. This prompted Lisa to recover alternative strands of her past. Insofar as patient-analyst and mother-child relations are comparable, then, the mother stands to her child as the patient does to the analyst (not, as analytic theorists often have it, the other way round, with the mother as the child’s first nurturing therapist). Having considered how future and past intersect in lived time, we can draw some general conclusions. Our relations with others are always structured by our pasts; our current relations tend to reproduce our past relations; mothers tend to reproduce with their children their past relations with their own mothers. This is the aspect of Übertragung, transference or carrying-over of the past. But, crucially, the present reproduces the past with a difference. As the mother reproduces her past relation to her mother with her child, the new encounter constantly changes what that past consisted in. The past can be reproduced only by being transformed, as the mother adjusts its content so that she can respond to the child in his or her novelty. The past that reappears is no longer as it was; it has been remodelled by the mother’s interactions with her child, interactions that are shaped by her future-oriented anticipation of and waiting for what the child may do, be and need. This is the aspect of Nachträglichkeit, carrying-along-after: as the past is carried forwards, it is rendered other than it originally was. Indeed, Nachträglichkeit obtains dramatically within mother-child relations. Although our relations with any other individuals, not only children, constantly reshape our pasts, a child is new in a radical way. As Hannah Arendt says, ‘with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before’ (1958, p.178). It is this radical novelty that confounds Lisa Goddard – and many mothers, who very often do not react to the birth of their children with immediate love, but take time to develop feelings for their babies as they excavate dormant strata of the past. The mother’s prior expectations will always be out of joint with the sheer novelty of the new-born baby’s existence, and so giving birth is liable to induce particularly dramatic shifts in a person’s internal past. V. The Temporality of Maternal Subjectivity In conclusion, we can return directly to the challenges posed by Baraitser’s account of maternal subjectivity. Can we see maternal time as past-centred and see the mother as open to the future and, in particular, to the radically open and inassimilable future of the child? I think so, to a point. This is because the child, as a new and open-structured being, prompts a continual remodelling and transformation of the mother’s past. This remodelling enables the mother to be open to an unexpected future, one that keeps exceeding her existing horizon, which prompts the mother to revisit and adjust her past again and again. Does this mean that, after all, maternal temporality is future-oriented? Not necessarily; for psychoanalytic theorists such as Loewald, future and past (as well as present) form an organic unity within which no single temporal dimension predominates. Even so, that conclusion conflicts with my own view that maternal temporality is distinctly past-oriented. Here we need to reconsider again the particular character of the past to which the mother is prompted to return, prompted by her child in his or her otherness to the mother. The young child is unformed, full of possibilities, an open structure, because he or she has not yet entered into the symbolic and socio-cultural order. So the child’s open-ended character goes together with his or her being a pre-verbal being, gripped by raw, unmediated affects and perceptions and inhabiting a very largely somatic register. For the same reason, as a creature of its body and bodily impulses, the young child is utterly dependent on his or her carers – in practice, usually the mother. Yet it is just this character of the infant and young child as a needy, bodily, impulsive, dependent being which prompts the mother to return to the ancient past in which she depended in the same way upon her own carer (in usual practice, mother). Moreover, as we saw earlier, the present-day mother-child relation is very different in this visceral, somatic dimension from most or all of the other relations that the mother maintains and has been used to maintaining as an adult. It is his or her bodily, dependent being that makes the child other to the mother’s horizon of expectations that she inherits from her normal adult interactions. So the mother is prompted to return to her archaic past so that she can respond to her child in his or her alterity. To become able to respond to her child as a being who diverges from what she expects based on her established, adult, internal horizon, the mother has to go back to her ancient past. In sum, the child as other prompts the mother to return to the part of her past that is also other to her as an adult: to greet otherness without, with otherness within. It is thus so that she can respond in a future-oriented way to her child that the mother returns to her archaic past: past and future are organically unified. Yet they are unified in a way that gives primacy to the past. I suggested earlier that the reappearing past has primacy in organising maternal time because that past inevitably exceeds and outstrips the mother’s present capacities as a speaking, narrating being. To this extent the mother always remains in the process of integrating a past that contains more than can be rendered present. This remains true even though she is prompted to return to this past by her futural orientation towards her child as one who is other to her. This very feature of the future – its alterity – is what pulls her back to a past that, likewise, she cannot fully assimilate into her present as an adult whose experience is mediated by language. But it is just because the mother cannot fully assimilate this past that she remains oriented towards it. It is openness to the future that directs the mother back upon this past; but, being continually directed back upon this past, the mother cannot complete the movement of bringing it into the present. Thus she remains oriented towards the past, trying to articulate and make sense of all that it contains, yet where it necessarily exceeds her powers of articulation. Turning to Baraitser’s second challenge, can we see the mother as reproducing her maternal past with her child without reducing her relational position to that of a daughter? Certainly, the mother remains a daughter insofar as she reproduces with her child her past with her own mother: ‘Not only is the daughter who becomes a mother still the daughter of her mother, but her daughterhood is part of her motherhood’ (Juhasz 2003, p.399). However, as Juhasz also says, the mother is no longer only a daughter; another force is now active which transforms the way in which she is a daughter. This new force is that the mother relives her relation to her own mother differently by reliving it with her child as someone new and unique. Consequently, as the mother relives her past, that past is transformed. Whereas the daughter’s position as a subject is to differ from while remaining connected to her mother, if the daughter becomes a mother then that position undergoes a change. As a mother, she now relives the process of being connected to and differentiating herself from her own mother all along, in the new shape of her connection to and self-differentiation from her child. The mother’s position is that of being a daughter once again, with a difference. This repetition with a difference makes possible a distinctly maternal subject-position. This subject-position rests on the mother’s placing herself back within the maternal body relations of her past, so that she strives to integrate these relations into narrative and render them meaningful. To place herself back into these relations is to position herself as one of two: to understand herself, implicitly, as one whose agency and intelligence only arise insofar as she identifies with and models herself upon her own remembered mother. Tacitly, the mother sees herself as one who makes meaning not as a monadic individual but by identifying with and imitating her own mother. Moreover, crucially, the mother places herself back into her past maternal relations as they are re-created within her present relation with her child. The mother implicitly takes herself to make meaning out of her previously constitutive relation with her own mother as it is transposed into her new relation with her child. The mother is a relational subject, but doubly so: she inhabits two sets of relations transposed upon one another. To appreciate this doubly relational structure of maternal subjectivity, we need to think of this form of subjectivity as involving a complicated temporal structure. To repeat the past with a difference is to cycle back through the past anew, and thus to experience under a cyclical form of temporality. This cyclical form of temporality in turn depends upon the intersection of ancient past and linguistic present. 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Studies in the Maternal 1 (1). http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/back_issues/issue_one/journal.html Accessed 4 June 2010. White, S. H., and D. B. Pillemer. 1989. Childhood Amnesia and the Development of a Socially Accessible Memory System. In: Kihlstrom, J. F. &. Evans, F. J., eds. Functional Disorders of Memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 4 Alison Stone. Maternal Memory and Lived Time Studies in the Maternal, 4(1), 2012, HYPERLINK "http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk" www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk Alison Stone. Maternal Memory and Lived Time Studies in the Maternal, 4(1), 2012, HYPERLINK "http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk" www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk