A New Lilith: About Letting Go

In the following, I refer to an article by Hans-Joachim Maaz: "The dark side of femineity - the Lilith complex" (1).

Lilith (Hebrew: "the nocturnal one") is the Adam's first wife, his God created, equal partner. Nevertheless, according to tradition Adam prefers another playmate: Eve who submits to him (Lilith is unwilling to do so) and with whom he lives patriarchally, but also outside paradise. Today Lilith stands as a symbol for emancipation and female autonomy, for self-determination and a pleasurably experienced sexuality - and for "the dark side of femininity".

The Taboo

Maaz' thesis is that the latter, Lilith's dark side, is a part of the female psyche which has been put under taboo but lives on in all women today. He pinpoints the taboo as an unspoken anti-child attitude and refusal of maternity and identifies "the associated early disturbance of the mother-child relationship as reason for our increasingly neurotic society" (2).

However, why should Lilith be against children and maternity across-the-board? In the Lilith legend she demands equal rights with her partner Adam - no more and no less. Merely if these equal rights are not given any more she would have reason to turn against what she discern as instrument of her oppression: children and maternity.

Children and maternity are not instruments of oppression by definition. However, they are if the woman is denied her freedom of choice. Of which taboo are we talking? Maybe it is the famous blind spot of our own world view: women have still no right to fully decide over their bodies in most countries - what coencloses the right to abort. (3)

So it is probably subordinated and disenfranchised Eve (4) who didn't have a choice in the first place, who feels "murderous rage, abysmal hatred, piercing pain, vomiting disgust and heartbreaking sorrow" (5): about the fact that she is deprived of the right to decide over her own body and for power-political reasons for centuries has been degraded to a birthing machine. (6)

Yes or No

"...So I have the choice, full power. I can come into contact with the child, with myself, and perceive, which decision for me has internal accuracy. Then I can give room to my decision, consciously to let it grow, or not. If I no longer have the courage to do so, to take this responsibility, I no longer can teach the child to which I will give life to. What is a true MOTHER? One who gives a sure framework for the light and the darkness of life. One to which the child can entrust itself in the most helpless time of its life, because she, the true mother, includes "everything" in her framework of life. Then children could learn something very fundamental from us women, something fundamental for their lives, namely true spiritual respect and devotion to everything that exists. From a powerless mother, a sacrifice-mother, one cannot learn these fundamental spiritual attitudes, even if she tries to be as dedicated as Mary. Mary is too docile to give the child a sure framework, so this is often delegated to an authority-figure Father/God..." (7)

Maaz describes the Lilith complex as a lack of motherliness. I agree with him - however with a different prefix: A mother-against-her-will will never be whom we fancy under the archetypal ideal of a mother. Only a clear, self-determined "Yes" towards her child does it.

However, a clear "Yes" essentially requires the possibility to say "No". Maaz calls the latter - perfectly in line with the prevailing culture - "anti-child attitude". Nevertheless, this "No" to child and pregnancy is not directed against the child itself: it solely means that a woman exercises her right of self-determination.

Early separation of mother and child through nurseries etc. is, according to Maaz, just another expression of a "lack of motherliness". However, I think what weighs heavier than a colorful bounty of psychological parents (thus a polyamournesic (8) network) is the mother-against-her-will‘s inability to actually let go of her child. She has sacrificed her self-contained identity to the unwanted child and by pregnancy and childbirth only became a factual mother without ever having consciously chosen this role.

Who is she without child? She cannot return to her prior role as an adult woman who is responsible for herself, because her life was forcefully pushed into a direction she never would have chosen voluntarily.

The only way a mother-against-her-will can ban her identity crisis is through imperturbably clinging to her child as her mission and purpose of being and keeping it dependent forever. All the possessive, encroaching, demanding, exhausting mothers are Eves - not Liliths.

I think that letting go is an inherent aspect of motherhood. Lilith releases her child in love so that it can become (just as herself again) an independent person. The original embryonic relatedness of mother and child is formally-materially dissolved through the birth act, resulting in emotional and psychic independence in the months and years that follow.

Lilith is not anti-child by definition. Her "Yes!" is a clear one towards child and pregnancy. And because she has retained her own integrity she is able to fulfill what true motherhood ultimately should lead to: letting go.

Love is to let go of. To leave something as it is. Because one oneself may be as one is.

(3) There is a worldwide trend toward liberalization of abortion laws.
The vast majority of countries in Europe and the United States have a deadline rule, some for over 30 years. Canada has no abortion law at all. Examples:
Germany: In Germany abortion is generally illegal under Section 218 of the Penal Code. However, under Penal Code Section 218a there are a number of exceptions.
Austria: After previous advice by a doctor abortion within the first three months of pregnancy goes unpunished in Austria since 1975.
Switzerland: Since October 1, 2002, abortion until the 12th week of pregnancy is decriminalized nationwide
Canada: The Constitutional Court cancelled prohibition of pregnancy termination in 1988. Canada is consequently one of the very few countries without abortion law and where only the people concerned (woman and physician) decide the course of action.
USA: On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States made a groundbreaking ruling (called Roe v. Wade): with 7:2 votes it decided that the fundamental right of personal liberty and privacy includes a woman's right to freely decide termination within the first 6 months of pregnancy.
This ruling meant that abortions were no longer performed in illegality but under good medical conditions.
On November 5, 2003, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was put into law, which, without exception, prohibits and puts under penalty abortion in advanced pregnancy (2nd and 3rd trimester).
Natural religions: In many places, especially for people living in matrilinear societies, the decision regarding abortion is the sole concern of the woman and/or her family. The child's father has nothing to say. Some primitive peoples who believe in metempsychosis do not consider abortion as killing, but rather offering the child a more appropriate time to recur. The indigenous people of Australia and other nomadic peoples use abortion purposefully as a method of birth control.
Sources
General:
http://www.svss-uspda.ch/de/facts/facts.htm
Legal situation and history http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwangerschaftsabbruch (Original; English see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_abortion )
Legal situation USA
http://www.svss-uspda.ch/de/facts/usa.htm (German)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial-Birth_Abortion_Ban_Act

(4) The question may arise, why Eva is actually considered suppressed, it seems that she voluntarily assumes her submissive position. Here I can only quote a previously used reference:

"One of the most important aspects... is that the disciplinary power that inscribes femininity is everywhere and nowhere. The disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular. Foucault's relationship of power to the body is that the external inscriptions of power become internalized and lived. It does not reside in any particular institution and it is unbound. And this "absence of formal institutional structure" makes it seem that the production of femininity is natural and voluntary. Actually these disciplines can be voluntary and involuntary at the same time. Nevertheless, they "must be understood as aspects of a far larger discipline, an oppressive and inegalitarian system of sexual subordination... Even though there are no formal sanctions or disciplinarians, a woman who refuses to follow these disciplines will stop being a woman. She will find herself facing the most significant rejection of all in a patriarchal society that is the refusal of male patronage."

(See also: http://www.soika.com/links/archiv/04e_lotus.htm;
from: "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power". Sandra Lee Bartky, in Feminism and Foucault. Irene Diamond & Lee Quinby eds.
http://web.hku.hk/~h0171482/hw1.htm
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Bartky.html)

(5): The Lilith complex, Hans-Joachim Maaz, in "Psychology Heute", 2001, see above; It should be noted that Maaz ascribes these feelings exclusively to children of "Lilith mothers who are unable to love".

(6) "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." (Margaret Sanger)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger

(7) Weise Wege, Planungsgruppe Klinik für ganzheitliche Frauenheilkunde e. V., P. 31

(8) Polyamournesia [po:liamu:r'ne:sia]: Made-up word from polýs "much" (Greek), amour "love" (French) and mnasthai "to remember" (Greek); ability to remember and/or to receive the many sources of love
http://www.soika.com/links/archiv/06_poly.htm