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[Clinical experiences with late mothers and their wished for children]
By way of introduction, this article considers the growth of the desire for a child and problems of counter-transference among older, but in terms of motherhood younger parents. The discussion concerns disturbance of the mother-child relationship among 34 child psychiatry patients whose mothers were between 37 and 44 years of age when they were born. The article expresses the view that late motherhood, beginning shortly before the end of the reproductive phase, is related to a particular problem of inner maturation among late mothers. With the birth of a child, late mothers enter into a state of sustained partial regression that endangers active adjustment and the maternal care of the child during all developmental phases. The mother's need to be more or less mothered herself by her child is a sign of the mother's difficulties in detaching herself from her own mother. As a result of the causal disturbance in the process of maturation toward a maternal identity, problems in the relationship between both late and minority-age mothers reveal many similarities, though there are also fundamental differences between the two.
By way of introduction, this article considers the growth of the desire for a child and problems of counter-transference among older, but in terms of motherhood younger parents. The discussion concerns disturbance of the mother-child relationship among 34 child psychiatry patients whose mothers were between 37 and 44 years of age when they were born. The article expresses the view that late motherhood, beginning shortly before the end of the reproductive phase, is related to a particular problem of inner maturation among late mothers. With the birth of a child, late mothers enter into a state of sustained partial regression that endangers active adjustment and the maternal care of the child during all developmental phases. The mother's need to be more or less mothered herself by her child is a sign of the mother's difficulties in detaching herself from her own mother. As a result of the causal disturbance in the process of maturation toward a maternal identity, problems in the relationship between both late and minority-age mothers reveal many similarities, though there are also fundamental differences between the two.