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

The Maternalists explores the significance of utopian visions of the state as a maternal entity in mid-twentieth-century Britain, demonstrating the affinities between welfarism, maternalism, and psychoanalysis. Figures such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Geza Róheim used psychoanalytic vocabulary to promote imagined perceptions of motherhood and their idea of the real essence of the maternal, becoming a cultural discourse of collective social anxieties and fantasies.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 25 April 2024
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

The Maternalists delves into the previously underexplored significance of utopian visions of the state as a maternal entity in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Through the demonstration of affinities between welfarism, maternalism, and psychoanalysis, Shaul Bar-Haim offers a fresh interpretation of the British welfare state as a political project. Following the First World War, British doctors, social thinkers, educators, and policymakers grew increasingly intrigued by the contemporary shift in psychoanalytic theory toward the role of motherhood in child development. These public figures employed novel notions of the maternal to critique modern European culture, particularly its patriarchal domestic structure. This line of thought was pioneered by figures well-positioned to disseminate their ideas into the higher echelons of British culture, education, and medical care. Figures such as anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Geza Róheim, as well as psychiatrist Ian Suttie, are just a few of the maternalists examined in the book who used psychoanalytic vocabulary to promote both imagined perceptions of motherhood and their conception of the maternal's true essence.

In the 1930s, as European fascism gained traction, the maternal emerged as a cultural discourse encompassing collective social anxieties and fantasies, as well as a central concept in various 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, advocating for maternalizing British society, and providing postwar Britain with a new political idiom for defining the welfare state as a project of collective care.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781512826050