Mother Courage: Reflections on Maternal Resilience

This paper attempts to develop a psychoanalytic perspective on maternal resilience. It argues that notions of resilience have been largely focused on the development of resilience in children, with the mother being viewed as a key figure in understanding its success or failure. However, the development of maternal resilience – the capacity for mothers to survive the vicissitudes of the parenting experience itself – has received less attention, occluding an important aspect of maternal subjectivity. Drawing on recent work on maternal ambivalence, this paper explores the relation between ambivalence and resilience, and provides clinical material from a two‐year slow‐open analytic group for mothers at the Maya Centre to illustrate our view that maternal resilience may usefully describe the aspect of ambivalence that entails bearing and accepting ourselves as mothers as well as our ambivalent feelings about our children.