The mother’s bond with the child is domination, not a penis-substitute

Evidence

It has been said again and again that woman happily finds an equivalent of the penis in the infant: this is completely wrong. In fact, the adult man no longer sees his penis as a wonderful toy: his organ is valued in relation to the desirable objects it allows him to possess; by the same token, the adult woman envies the male for the prey he acquires, not the instrument of this acquisition; the infant satisfies this aggressive eroticism that the male embrace does not fulfill: the infant is homologous to this mistress that she is for the male and that he is not for her; of course there is no exact correspondence; every relation is unique; but the mother finds in the child—like the lover in the beloved—a carnal plenitude, not in surrender but in domination; she grasps in the child what man seeks in woman: an other, both nature and consciousness, who is her prey, her double. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1508

Categorization

• XREF: Directly revises the Freudian/Lacanian account of motherhood as penis-envy sublimation; connects to the book’s broader existentialist frame of the Other. — connects to: Weaning from the mother’s body coincides with the child’s first attempts to seduce others — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 677; The mother’s desire toward her son is contradictory possession, not simple castration. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1519
• DEFINE: Clarifies Beauvoir’s concept of the child as ‘an other, both nature and consciousness’ — a key instance of the master-slave dialectic in maternal form.