A mother’s rejection of a child can disguise self-contempt projected outward.

Evidence

I know a mother who disliked at birth her fourth daughter, a quiet charming girl … She claimed that this child had inherited, in concentrated measure, all her father’s unpleasant traits … The child was born to her during the year when this exalted, dreamy woman had fallen passionately in love with another man, a poet, who was courting her … during her husband’s embraces she permitted her mind to dwell on the poet, hoping that the child would thus become endowed with her beloved’s traits—as in Goethe’s Elective Affinities. However, the child looked so much like its father, from the moment of its birth, that its paternity was obvious … She saw in the child a reflection of herself—a reflection of the dreamy, tender, yielding, sensual side of herself. She despised these qualities, scorned them in herself. She would have preferred to have been strong, unyielding, vigorous, prudish, and energetic. Thus she hated herself even more than she hated her husband through her hatred of the child. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1525

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to psychoanalytic notions of projection and to the Elective Affinities motif of imagined paternity — a cross-domain literary echo within the same chapter. — connects to: The refusal to give chills the whole self and recoils on the refuser; An unfulfilled mother displaces her frustrated desires onto her child as compensation. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1515; Uncertainty about paternity can destroy a mother’s attachment to her child (+4 more)
• FICTION: The premise — a woman trying to shape her unborn child’s traits by concentrating on a beloved — is a ready-made story seed about superstition and self-betrayal.

Broader Connections

• A rejecting mother’s unresolved shadow can subconsciously sabotage a woman’s pregnancies. #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1441
• Mothers can treat their own daughters as rivals to be defeated #exemplifies (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1728
• A mother treats her daughter as a double and feels betrayed by her separateness. #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1520