This book examines the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. Beginning with close readings of the figure of the mother within psychoanalytic theory, it shows how the mother emerges as an obscure stumbling block in Freud's meta-psychological accounts of the psyche and haunts his writings on art and literature by becoming associated with some of psychoanalysis' most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). This uncanny maternal figure bears witness to the fact that birth itsel ... More

This book examines the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. Beginning with close readings of the figure of the mother within psychoanalytic theory, it shows how the mother emerges as an obscure stumbling block in Freud's meta-psychological accounts of the psyche and haunts his writings on art and literature by becoming associated with some of psychoanalysis' most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). This uncanny maternal figure bears witness to the fact that birth itself is radically unthinkable and can only be expressed through uncontrollable repetitions which exceed the bounds of any subject. Moving from psychoanalysis to technology, the book then goes on to argue that the maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies (such as photography and the telephone) which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties which are provoked by the inevitable experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably entails. As the very incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that may have otherwise remained unimaginable.