Motherhood and the working psychiatrist
Current Psychiatry. 2019 March;18(3):40-43
March 1, 2019|Psychiatry
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“For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.”
– Elizabeth Blackwell
Psychiatrists frequently discuss Winnicott’s “good-enough mother” concept, with the mother transitioning from focusing on her baby’s needs to her own sense of personhood that is unable to respond to her baby’s every wish.6 This concept was established well before the shifting demographics of the nuclear family, the short maternity leaves and early returns to work, early separation of one’s infants to childcare settings, and experiences with pumped lactation milk that working mothers experience today. Is it any wonder childbearing female psychiatrists face a special kind of working-mother guilt?
