MPI Visiting Professor E. Kirsten Dahl, PhD., Dinner and Presentation Event

Abstract

“Blow out your candles…and goodbye!”:  The vicissitudes of maternal identifications in the adolescent male. Using Williams’ The Glass Menagerieas illustrative material, in this paper I explore the vicissitudes of maternal identifications for the adolescent boy. The mind is developed in the matrix of the maternal-infant relationship.  From the beginning, therefore, the mind is stamped by the imago of the archaic mother.  As the boy develops, other maternal identifications become associated with this early mental structure.  These identifications are not monolithic since included are the mother’s fantasies of what it is to be male and what it is for her to be in relation to her fantasy of “masculinity.”  With the loosening ego structures under the pressure of the upsurge of the drives in early adolescence, these primitive identifications with the mother become a source of conflict for both the boy and the girl.  For the boy, however, the associative pathways between the maternal identifications and “femininity” are experienced as inherently problematic.  Reading The Glass Menagerie  as a case study of late male adolescent development, we can begin to explore the nature of these conflicts and possible resolutions.

Learning Objectives: 

At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:

1.  Analyze the role of maternal identifications in adolescent male development and their influence on creativity, aggression, and masculinity.

2.  Apply psychoanalytic concepts to assess and address conflicts related to maternal identifications and "femininity" in clinical practice with adolescent boys.

Biography

E Kirsten Dahl, PhD, is a Training/Supervising Child, Adolescent and Adult Analyst Emerita at Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (WNEIP). She is on the Faculty of the Child Analysis Program, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, Dallas/Houston and the Southeastern Consortium for Child Psychoanalysis. She is a past Chair of the WNEIP Child Psychoanalysis Training Program. She was affiliated with the Child Study Center of the Yale University School of Medicine beginning as a Special Research Fellow in 1970 and continued in various roles that spanned more than 20 years, ultimately as Associate Professor of Child Psychoanalysis from 1991-1993. She lives in Austin, Texas, and continues her analytic practice and teaching remotely. She has written extensively on feminine development, gender, adolescence, representations of the mother in the developing mind and analytic work with very young children.