A Tale of Two Boobies

It never seemed controversial in the least to me that the way my mother had a habit of rooting through boxes of stored belongings with the stated intention of clearing some of them out, though never doing so, could be indicative of a lingering dependency on, or a sense of disappointment and longing inherent to her relationship with her own mother. Or of the one she had with her father, who, as a customs officer, was a professional rooter-through of belongings. My mother even joked about it, saying she had inherited her love of inspecting the contents from him. In this way, I have perhaps for a long time imagined my mother first and foremost as someone’s child rather than as someone’s mother.

The continuum of mothers and children taken as a whole has more significance than the discrete roles of individual actors within it. There is a certain diffusion that happens between the roles available, and this is probably a good thing.

I was asked if I related to British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s writings. I’m not sure. They have a preoccupation with what is good and what is bad that makes me uneasy. It should but doesn’t help that what is healthy to her is the overcoming of the splitting of the two and learning to tolerate ambiguity. She seems to imply some moral content in this overcoming. Gratitude is good, aggression is bad, living in envy and resentment can’t be productive (and will probably make you mad). This makes me wonder whether the bits I do relate to are also inflected with this moralism, somehow too simplistic. I wonder if I am allowing myself to be lulled into a sense that I now understand this or that dynamic or situation in my relational world, be it with my mother, sisters or friends (the mother–child continuum expands laterally), when in fact I am just interested in assigning blame.

Maybe it is this moral clarity hidden within purported tolerance of ambiguity that compels me. People love moral clarity and maybe I’m no better. The old ‘good breast/bad breast’ begins to play out in my head when I reflect on conflicts with close friends.^[1] Sometimes I have dreams about it. In one I attacked a former friend’s soft white rounded cheek, in the dream undeniably breast-like, biting it violently. Melanie Klein writes of the baby:

From the beginning the destructive impulse is turned against the object and is first expressed in phantasied oral-sadistic attacks on the mother’s breast, which soon develop into onslaughts on her body by all sadistic means. The persecutory fears arising from the infant’s oral-sadistic impulses to rob the mother’s body of its good contents, and from the anal-sadistic impulses to put his excrements into her (including the desire to enter her body in order to control her from within) are of great importance for the development of paranoia and schizophrenia.^[2]

I also had a dream about people being literally full of shit, and animated by it, like zombies. I had these dreams before I had a child, but the long tail of breastfeeding draws me to the dark intensity of Klein’s interpretation of an infant’s psyche. It’s all like a maze of reversals, an infinite regression of projection and introjection (two concepts central to Klein’s work), of putting onto someone else and taking into yourself.^[3] It is hard to keep tabs on where you start and the other ends, though perhaps this is the point. The enduring nature of the struggle of intimacy, of dependence and autonomy, crystallised in the breastfeeding relation.

In Klein the fear of one’s own destructive impulse is experienced as the fear of the overpowering object, and feelings of guilt about phantasies of destruction are dealt with by ascribing guilt to the object of the aggression (the mother). Yet, ‘Guilt has, however, not been done away with, and the deflected guilt is felt as an unconscious responsibility for the people who have become representatives of the aggressive part of the self.’^[4]

All this feels very true to life. We feel responsible even for the people we think are out to get us, because it is actually us who are out to get them, and we fear our hypothetical power to destroy, while also seeing ourselves in the other person.

But maybe this is just me. I have had my fair share of what I would call paranoid-schizoid friendships, in varying degrees, and I have often felt that I was on the receiving end of some intense mummy-issues – always the bad boob, never the good one. Except in the beginning, of course, when I am all good boob, none of the bad. Some might call it a honeymoon period, others idealization. It would seem to me that many people look to be released from their projective identifications by a friend with an ability to offer endless love, patience and gratification. They want it so much they conjure such persons from their imagination, or project such qualities on people who do not possess them.

And while friends are still different from mothers, they can make good projection screens for how our mothers failed to love us, or for how society as a whole fails to love or affirm us. Friends can never take on all that burden of loving, they can only ever do their part, which may be to give us the satisfaction of a disappointment. They take on the burden of not loving.

It would seem I jump on the chance to be good and vow to endure all attacks, maybe because I think I am in possession of some unearned advantage in life, ‘privileged’ in endless ways I am sure I don’t fully grasp. I have the upper hand (I try to convince myself I do, as what if I don’t?). I have the upper hand, therefore I can take it. And because I can take it, I should. By virtue of existing in the subject position, class position, identity position, that I do, I feel guilty, but also because I feel broadly looked after by my parents. This is the greatest unearned advantage, the greatest source of guilt. Guilt felt not towards my parents, who love me despite my aggression towards them, but guilt felt towards all the people whose parents didn’t love them, or whose parents did, but were unable to show it or transform it into care.

I jump at the chance to be good despite or perhaps because I am not. Fearful that actually existing inequality is the outward expression of my own destructive impulses, I dwell in guilty mothering until I snap and do something that warrants rejection.

In Klein envy is concomitant to the aggression felt towards an all-powerful object, the mother, but perhaps later in life also those perceived to be in a position of power. If we love someone for what we feel they could give us, while hating them for their actual inability to provide those things – love, care, sense of security, agency – we also envy them those things.

Historian Carolyn Steedman (among others) has made the connection between envy and class, reflecting on the origin stories within psychoanalysis, such as Klein’s (bad/good boob) and Freud’s (Oedipus), and how the notion of exclusion plays out in them without the acknowledgement of the larger societal context surrounding people’s interpretations of these formative experiences later in life. In one we are denied a breast, in the other the exclusive possession of our parents.

If there were no history, if people were not conscious of themselves living within time and society, and if they did not use their own past to construct explanations of the present, then the myth – this particular one [Oedipus], others like it – could be allowed to stand, as a timeless and universal allegory of human development, and the relationship of culture to that development. But we live in time and politics and exclusion is the promoter of envy, the social and subjective sense of the impossible unfairness of things. The first loss, the first exclusion, will be differently interpreted by the adult who used to be a child, according to the social circumstances she finds herself in, and the story she needs to relate.^[5]

So what is the story I need to relate? The one where I am in a position of power? One where my friends are? Is the power economic? Social? Intellectual? What is the role of middle class guilt? Is it a dumb cultural cliché that is convenient in constructing stories of why we behave in certain ways? The nuances of individual situations are always more complex than that, the vectors of power multiple – we can all play out our exclusion dramas in relation to each other from various angles. And we exclude so as not to be excluded.

I stretch the Kleinian dynamic to its limits as the socioeconomic factors in play in every one of my relationships build up. The existential struggles of the baby become the existential struggles of adults – some more urgent than others. It’s always mummy issues, though I am now not sure whose they are. Theirs? Mine? My mother’s?

And then I had a baby, and a new thing to feel guilty about was opened up. A baby at my age? The pleasures of motherhood must be hidden so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. They turn inward and crawl onto the internet. I must have clicked on one of these videos at some point as they keep getting pushed to me. Seemingly endless stream of videos of small babies with a text (and a computer-generated voiceover) saying:

‘Look what three months of breastfeeding did to my baby!’

A tiny newborn baby… then… pop! A chubby little three-month-old one, looking quite different.

Whether or not I did anything to attract these videos onto my timeline, I am attracted to them now. I relate to the sentiment espoused by them. The visceral, objectifying joy of feeding your child, from your own breast no less, and seeing them grow at record speed. My big baby! Click, click, click. ‘Look what three months of breastfeeding did to my baby!’, I triumphantly say to myself. Could this be me enjoying my position of power instead of feeling guilty for it? Not by withholding, but by giving – me the all-powerful object, the good boob that does not come without the bad. Giving is powerful because it is propped up by the possibility of taking away.

The videos bring to mind the writings of the Freudian psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch and her descriptions of the ‘masculine–aggressive woman’ who also (that is, despite being ‘unfeminine’) enjoys breastfeeding: ‘Lactation is an accomplishment of which she is proud, and the dependence of her children upon her gives her the kind of satisfaction she desires.’^[6]

The pleasure and pride in how you (you!) are able to make the baby grow like this. It is so obvious there is a meme about it. For Deutsch even previously passive women can become increasingly masculine (which to her means active) after becoming mothers, as the child’s dependency is particularly threatening to their own ego. There is a limit to the enjoyment that can be had from breastfeeding because the dependency of the child threatens our already mythical and fragile autonomy.

Deutsch has been much maligned as having reactionary views on women, but there is something hilariously relatable about some of the characters she sketches out in an effort to describe the psychology of motherhood. Deutsch describes well the ambivalences inherent to motherhood and particularly breastfeeding, even if she divides these conflicted and enmeshed experiences into (almost arche-) types. One could think of these types as actually describing the spectrum of confused and conflicted feelings one has upon becoming a mother in a world that places confused and conflicted expectations on women at every turn. Take her description of mothers who depend on their partners’ nurturing efforts to be able to take on the role of a mother themselves: she gives as an example women whose husbands have gone to war, and who are subsequently completely helpless as mothers.^[7] This is what I fear I am like, ultimately useless without my partner should push ever come to shove. And incompatible with another, more contemporary stereotype, that of the heroic single mother who doesn’t need anyone else, though of course everyone needs someone else in order to mother. It is not just the baby who is dependent; the mother is dependent too (on partners, friends, family, state support, other communal support, on their child), but there is still something that one is not supposed to acknowledge about this.

This is where the drama of breastfeeding lies. Not (only) in the struggle with the dependency of the child, and that this somehow threatens our sense of self, but also in how we see our own vulnerability mirrored in the child, echoing our other flawed, incomplete and frustrating connections to the world that go against what we are told we should aspire to. We are told to be independent yet everywhere are bound to the expanded mother–child continuum, even through relationships that no longer exist. Sometimes friendships end but still remain inescapable, not unlike the connection between parent and child.

One friend confessed to me that she didn’t like breastfeeding because it made her feel sad, a sort of primal longing, a forgotten mode of connecting with her own mother perhaps. She preferred not to. When I breastfed more wholeheartedly, in the very first moments of each feed I always experienced a strange sort of melancholia, exactly like a very specific, fleeting and hard-to-explain sensation I often had as a child and used to refer to as ‘the ordinary feeling’. A strange sense of emptiness as if an existential vacuum had momentarily formed within me. A feeling that, despite the name I’d given it, was pretty extraordinary in the momentary insight into the human condition it gave me, a sense of longing and being forlorn that for a second felt inescapable and foundational. It was a feeling begging for a way to be verbally expressed, but the closest words I found – ‘the ordinary feeling’ – have never seemed enough.

The ordinary feeling is intellectual, emotional and physiological. It is psychosomatic in some pure sense. Not a physical symptom of a psychological state of affairs, but rather a sensation that makes clear how inseparable the physical is from the psychic.

Maybe this is why Klein resonates: because her writing offers a way to unpack the ordinary feeling. Maybe the ordinary feeling is an echo of the depressive position, which in Klein marks the child’s realisation of the unity of the loved and hated part-objects and the melancholy longing that ensues.^[8]

Somehow off the back of this I convince myself not only that the ordinary feeling is universal and shared, but that it was the loaded nature of the ordinary feeling that made my friend dislike breastfeeding.

When I was a child the ordinary feeling lingered with a kind of thirst that I imagined being quenched by drinking very cold milk – cow’s milk, ironically, now that I am becoming convinced that this sensation is bound to breastfeeding. Though perhaps cold cow’s milk represented independence from the warm human milk of our mothers and all the complexities that came with it, the knowledge of the longing (and disappointment) inherent to love it left us burdened with.

The cold milk remedy could never be put to the test because the ordinary feeling only ever lasted for seconds so there wasn’t enough time to employ it. I sometimes speculated on a scenario where I would get the ordinary feeling while standing next to the fridge, enabling me to reach for the milk at lighting speed and drink it directly from the carton before the feeling dissipated on its own.

As a grown-up I have come to hate cow’s milk. I find the sweet blandness of the taste of milk offensive. The insipid surface innocence – ‘Who? Moi?’ – cut with just a hint of tripe. It’s not an ethical objection. I do have an ethical objection to dairy production, but my repulsion at milk predates this. It is not lactose intolerance – though I have an intolerant attitude towards milk and to an extent people who drink it. The offense I take is brutal and moralistic. It comes from the same place as the awful expression ‘man up’, from a distaste for all forms of (inter)dependency: now, instead of signifying independence, cow’s milk has somehow conceptually merged with human breast milk. This distaste goes so far against the social norms I have grown up with and am surrounded by that voicing it feels very transgressive. It feels liberating to say: ‘Milk is for the weak, the people who yearn for the dependent state of childhood.’

Outside of breastfeeding, masculine-aggressive women dislike the more complicated forms of dependency that come with motherhood, their entire masculine posture being in a sense a reaction to the threat of dependency.

This is of course entirely anecdotal, but I do find that men more often than women like to drink milk and milky, creamy products, and I instinctively read it as a sign of their failure to stand on their own two feet. It is the persistence of the insane idea that anyone should which, I think, makes breastfeeding a baby so intense.

In Klein it is the boundaries of the baby that are being established in the act of breastfeeding, but while in the eyes of the baby this process also eventually bestows integrity to the mother, for the mother herself there is no getting away from the sense that her boundaries are opened up in the same instance. At the very least she is reminded of this risk, of the question of where does one draw the line? What does she do with another’s ‘desire to enter her body in order to control her from within’? Stopping breastfeeding can be very difficult.

When I have had partners who drank cow’s milk I have semi-consciously worried that they would be too needy, that they would expect me to mother them. Perhaps I wanted them to look after me. All relationships can slide into competition over who gets to be taken care of and who has to be the caretaker. Perhaps I see myself as adhering to some masculinist norm of ‘strength’ and want them to match me. I don’t cry so I don’t like anyone else crying either. Not a grown-up.

Having a child has mellowed me a little on milk. After all, the masculine-aggressive mother also enjoys breastfeeding. I enjoy breastfeeding and still do it well into my child’s third year. My therapist points out something Lacan said (with caveats, as what would he know) – that weaning trauma is real but it is the mother who is traumatised. I am not sure what he meant with this, but maybe it’s something like: for the child stopping breastfeeding opens up a world of opportunity, of endless new things to explore with their mouths.^[9] The mother is perhaps more conscious of loss.

I can’t find where Lacan said this. What I find he did say is that for the child weaning offers the first mental (and physical) representation of the earlier more profound separation that happens at birth. First of many. Something the child and mother share.

The conflict between wanting to be needed and wanting not to be needed all that much persists.

---

^[1] For Klein the infant perceives the world in terms of simple part-objects that have either good or bad intentions towards it. Like the breast that either yields milk (good breast) or denies it (bad breast). When the infant develops, the good and bad aspects are integrated into more complete and complex objects. Good and bad breast evolve into the mother. However, strands of this black-and-white thinking persist and, to a lesser or greater degree, re-emerge in later stages of development and in adulthood.

^[2] Melanie Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963 (The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 3), The Free Press, 1975, p. 2.

^[3] Projection and introjection are alternating processes by which a subject acquires internal objects that construct their ego. Internal objects are mental representations of external objects, which themselves are to an extent the products of the subject projecting aspects of their self onto other people. Introjection is where the external objects are internalised. Projection and introjection carry on throughout life, with there being a specific importance to the early objects acquired from caregivers.

^[4] Melanie Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, p. 12.

^[5] Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, Virago Press, 2006, p. 111.

^[6] Helene Deutsch, Psychology of Women – A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Volume Two: Motherhood, Grune and Stratton, 1945, p. 286.

^[7] Ibid. pp. 272-273.

^[8] ‘If the confluence of loved and hated figures can be borne, anxiety begins to centre on the welfare and survival of the other as a whole object, eventually giving rise to remorseful guilt and poignant sadness, linked to the deepening of love.’ ‘Depressive Position’, Melanie Klein Trust, https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/theory/depressive-position/, accessed 22 August 2025.  

^[9] This is a suggestion made by Esther Leslie in the conversation I had with her and Melanie Jackson  that appears in They Flow Within Us.

This text appears in THEY FLOW WITHIN US, edited by Anni Puolakka and Maija Timonen. Garret Publications, 2026.

Breastfeeding, nursing, suckling, sucking, milking. Milk flows out of and into us, and we are what we drink. From the mouths of babes and into the struggles of adult relationships and global warming, nursing and consuming milk are bodily processes and social relations that touch us all. Banal, tender, greedy, painful, erotic. The contributions to this book span a wide range of approaches. Laden with questions of connection, dependence, power, survival, extraction and pleasure, suckling provides a malleable metaphor that gets into the material basis of mammalian existence.

THEY FLOW WITHIN US is a collection of texts, art and dialogues around the topic of lactation, nursing and suckling. Contributors include Teo Ala-Ruona, Hannah Black, Max Hannus, Melanie Jackson, Sanna Karhu, Esther Leslie, Renée Akitelek Mboya, Anni Puolakka, Miša Skalskis, Jutta Sperling and Maija Timonen.