The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State

Broadcast 6 October, 2021. Duration: 1 hour 15 minutes

______________________________________________________________________

The Maternalists is a study of the hitherto unexplored significance of utopian visions of the state as a maternal entity in mid-twentieth century Britain. Demonstrating the affinities between welfarism, maternalism, and psychoanalysis, Shaul Bar-Haim suggests a new reading of the British welfare state as a political project.

After the First World War, British doctors, social thinkers, educators, and policy makers became increasingly interested in the contemporary turn being made in psychoanalytic theory toward the role of motherhood in child development. These public figures used new notions of the “maternal” to criticize modern European culture, and especially its patriarchal domestic structure. Figures such as the anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Geza Róheim, and the psychiatrist Ian Suttie—to mention only a few of the “maternalists” discussed in the book—used psychoanalytic vocabulary to promote both imagined perceptions of motherhood and their idea of the “real” essence of the “maternal.”

In the 1930s, as European fascism took hold, the “maternal” became a cultural discourse of both collective social anxieties and fantasies, as well as a central concept in many strands of radical, and even utopian, political thinking. During the Second World War, and even more so in the postwar era, psychoanalysts such as D. W. Winnicott and Michael Balint responded to the horrors of the war by drawing on interwar maternalistic thought, making a demand to “maternalize” British society, and providing postwar Britain with a new political idiom for defining the welfare state as a project of collective care.

________________________________________________________________________

Speakers:

Shaul Bar-Haim is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and the author of The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State.

Lisa Appignanesi  OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, broadcaster and cultural commentator. She is a former chair of the Royal Society of Literature, a former president of English PEN, and chair of The Freud Museum London. Her award-winning books include Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love; Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, Trials of Passion: In the Name of Love and Madness and Freud’s Women (with John Forrester).

Daniel Pick is a psychoanalyst, writer and professor of history at the University of London. Alongside his clinical practice, he teaches and conducts research in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. His publications include, Svengali’s Web, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind , Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction and, as co-editor, Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism.