The Anger and the Resolve

In 1947, the English pediatrician Donald Win­nicott listed the reasons why it might be natural for a mother to hate her baby. His intention was to challenge the inherited idea that mothers spontaneously take to their children and, in this way, ensure that women felt less alone in their postpartum anxiety. The baby “is ruthless,” Winnicott wrote, and “treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave…. He is suspicious, refuses her good food, and makes her doubt herself.”