night, so I wouldn’t have to lie about where
I was.” She sighs. “Oh God. What a mess.
“I woke up at 6am and when I left the
hotel I turned on my phone. I had ten
voicemails and many texts from the
babysitter saying that my son had had an
asthma attack and that they were at the
hospital. I started sobbing, trying to reach
the doctor on the phone. I just couldn’t
believe that I had let that happen. That’s
when I decided to see a therapist.”
Eve doesn’t remember much from her
childhood. She remembers being alone
a lot, playing by herself under the desk in
the bedroom she shared with her three
younger brothers. She used to make little
people out of paper and play family with
them. They were the big family she hoped
she would have one day, a family with
many children who love and protect her
and one another. The space under the desk
was their home and she covered it with a
blanket and hid there so she could play her
imaginary games without interruptions.
The wish for transformation was an
important part of her childhood fantasy.
And it happened. The little girl was
transformed into a beautiful, powerful and
successful woman. She created the family
she’d always wanted. But when her
daughter was 12 years old she suddenly
felt empty, as if she were dying inside.
“And then I met Josh,” she says. She is
silent for a moment, turns and gazes out
the window. “He takes care of me as if
I were a little girl,” she says quietly. “He
takes care of me the way no one ever did,
the way I imagine my mother took care
of her mother.”
I follow Eve’s associations and walk
with her into her family history, into the
bedroom where her sick grandmother lay,
Eve’s mother, Sara, then 12 years old, lying
next to her. This is the exact age of Eve’s
daughter when the affair with Josh began.“I don’t think she ever got over her
mother’s death,” Eve says. “She told me
about the last days of her mother’s life
many times, as if she needed me to know
every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.”
In the last few days of her mother’s life,
Sara didn’t go to school. She would crawl
into bed with her mother. She thought
that if she stayed in bed with her mother,
she could keep her alive; that if she made
sure she synchronised her breaths with
her mother’s, they would breathe together
for ever. On Sara’s 14th birthday her
mother took seven deep breaths, each of
them sounding like a sigh, and then one
last breath. She had a little smile on her
face, but she wasn’t alive any more. Eve
tells me this as if she is telling me about
her own dead mother.
She moves uncomfortably. “You
mentioned that my mother was 12 years
old when her mother got sick, and my
daughter was 12 when I started seeing
Josh. I never made that connection. When
we have sex I always cry. Once in a while
I ask him to save my life, to take me
somewhere, drive me far away.”
“It is not unusual for sex to become a
desperate attempt to heal our wounded
parents and ourselves,” I say, and Eve
starts to cry.The French psychoanalyst André Green
coined the term “dead mother”, referring
to an unavailable, usually depressed and
emotionally absent mother. He explained
that it was usually loss that caused the
mother to die emotionally, and that the
child then became invested for the rest of
her life in trying to connect to the mother,
in an attempt to revive and bring her back
to life. Any child whose most devastating
fear is abandonment will insist on
connecting with their mother and do
anything to feel close to her, including
compromising parts of themselves. When
they give up on bringing her back to life,
they will try to restore the connection
through the renunciation of their own
aliveness. They will meet the mother in
her deadness and thus will develop their
own emotional deadness.
The intergenerational aspect of
deadness is everywhere in Eve’s psyche.
She carries that emotional inheritance
and identifies with her dead mother.
Deep inside she, too, feels broken,
deadened, ashamed. As a child, she
tried to transform that feeling in the
moments when she dreamt about
creating life, about becoming a mother.
She fantasised about a life filled with
love, as she was struggling with layers of
death. The wish for reparation coloured
Eve’s sexual desire.
“I need Josh to pin me down. And then
I want him to touch me, gently, all over,”
Eve tells me. “I want him to hold me as
tight as he can, tie me to the bed so I
can’t move, so he has all the power and
I have no other choice but to trust him
to treat my soul with care. I want him to
make me feel better.”
But Josh could not repair the losses in
Eve’s life. In therapy Eve became aware
that the same thing she thought was
saving her life in fact made her an absent
and dead mother to her own children,
and so instead of repairing her history she
was repeating it. When she realised that
her son could have died, she had to face
reality, the painful truth that what has
been done cannot be fully undone; it can
only be processed and mourned.
At the end of our session, Eve puts on
her shoes, opens her bag and grabs her
keys, but she doesn’t put her glasses on
right away. Instead, she sits a minute in
silence and then smiles. “You know, I think
I’m actually looking forward to driving
myself today. I’m not sure why I never
realised this before: that being the driver
means I can choose where to go. I can go
home. Or not. It’s up to me.” I watch Eve
as she leaves my office, feeling hopeful
for her for the first time since we met nExtracted from Emotional Inheritance:
Moving Beyond the Legacy of Trauma
by Galit Atlas, published by Short Books
at £14.99“It’s not unusual for sex
to become a desperate
attempt to heal our
wounded parents,” I say,
and Eve starts to cry
The Sunday Times Magazine • 31ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL PARKIN