Consider the intensity of the conflict and the anguish it inflicts as, simultaneously, a woman produces aggressive thoughts toward her child while experiencing her passive helplessness in curbing or stifling those thoughts.
The second article on the subject in The New York Times reports on a case of postpartum psychosis. The report describes the emotional state of a woman in the months preceding the moment when she leapt from an eighth-floor window with her 10-month-old child strapped to her chest, killing herself. The child was cushioned by the woman's body and survived. Again, it was inner conflict that drove this woman to commit the deed. In cases of postpartum psychosis, the women are likely to possess a particularly harsh inner critic, and their defenses against that inner aggression are particularly weak.
The 44-year-old woman, "a levelheaded lawyer working for the State Supreme Court," had become obsessed within several months of her son's birth with the notion that she had caused him irrevocable brain damage. The baby had banged his head in a minor incident, and medical specialists, after examining him, reassured her that babies can withstand such minor bumps and that he was fine.
The newspaper account of this woman's emotional state needs to be read for an appreciation of the degree to which she was irrationally accusing herself of being a bad mother. It appears that, at the same time, she was identifying with her son who she believed would grow up to be damaged and helpless due to her "negligence." In her suicide note, she wrote that she had become, as a mother, "the worst of the worst."
By all appearances, she was painfully trapped in inner conflict. Her harsh inner critic mercilessly abused her with allegations that she was a bad mother. Through her inner passivity, she would have absorbed much of this aggression. Tormented by this inner aggression, she retreated far over to the passive side. Now it is understandable why she would begin to fixate on her son as the passive victim of her negligence and of her aggressive impulses toward him, just as she herself was, in a psychological sense, the passive, helpless victim of her own inner aggression. Frequently in cases of postpartum psychosis, the inner passivity is such that mothers become profoundly under the influence of commanding inner voices.
People who learn this knowledge are in a much stronger position to avoid inner conflict.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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