Motherhood Fears Beyond Psychoanalysis (Hereditary)

"Once we realized what was happening, we had to act, contain the damage.  Contain families.  Had to act against people who went home from a day of trying to kill the rest of us and cooked a nice dinner, oblivious to just how fucked they were in the head.  People who were otherwise good, who got warped on a fundamental level, left open to the preaching and the incitement of their angrier neighbors.  Two years of fighting before we got the word down from on high, that they couldn’t rehabilitate the ones they’d captured, the ones who’d listened too long.  The poor assholes would play nice until they saw an opportunity, then they’d take it, do as much damage as they could.  Two years fighting good people who’d been convinced they had to throw their lives away fighting an enemy that didn’t exist."

-Worm chapter 22.2

It's kind of an old adage for Amy to tell students that they're doomed to become like their parents, that no matter what they try they won't be able to shake the worldview and values that they were raised with. It's a genuinely scary thought, especially for those of us with abusive family members or those who made nasty mistakes in the past. We grow up living with the consequences of things that were never ours to control in the first place, and the idea that destiny or whatever other guiding forces of the universe will push us back on a track we reject is legitimately scary. This fear is common to almost all of us and is likely why parental figures play such a prominent role in psychoanalytic theory. At the same time, fear of becoming like your progenitor (which I'll call "Convergence" from this point on) is not dependent upon many of the social paradigms or antiquated conceptions of sexuality that pervade psychoanalysis, and so holds up much better than many other psychoanalytic concepts to modern readers.

Hereditary is a film that plays with that fear of old sins gone unpunished, of the lingering effects of abuse and manipulation which lead into a adulthood. Annie is a woman who was forced into parenthood against her will and in spite of her efforts, and her children struggle to trust her as a consequence of her mental illness and her attempts to control and correct them. In the therapy scene, Annie recalls how she and her brother were manipulated by her own mother Ellen, expressing the breakdown of trust while sidestepping the fact of her miserable experiences as a parent. Not only has Annie become a mother against her will, she has become the exact kind of mother she grew up fearing. 

Under this lens, the fears of motherhood discussed by Barbara Creed take on a new light. Rather than vague, subconscious constructions posited by Freud, the fears of motherhood become couched in powerful, conscious anxieties about one's own future and potential. Once somebody is mature enough to be somewhat independent (typically in the teenage years), they usually begin to question their parents and come to terms with certain toxic lessons they might have had pounded into them over the years. We think of concepts like birth or blood or even physical contact with revulsion because they remind us of the places where we lacked control and quite possibly still lack control. Motherhood is a position in which on can do a great deal of impressing and can't easily be resisted, which makes the danger of somebody screwing up a victim in this malleable state particularly stomach-churning.

This horror is common to many and is particularly powerful because it's not easy to shake or to escape. How do you know what conclusions you came to on your own and which ones were imposed on you by your upbringing? How many others before you have tried to rebel in the same manner you are, only to slip back into the same patterns of close-mindedness and hostility which you're so desperate to escape? Most people can never really tell if they've escaped the influences or the errors of their family, and this perpetual uncertainty is why fear of motherhood is so persistent and so influential in our media (doubly so in teen-focused media). You are trapped in a sort of cultural rut, unable to write your own destiny or even right your own wrongs, and you may not even be aware of this.