“I wonder if you will be sad?”: Employing the concept of mentalization psychosocially with low-income mothers

• Published in: Psychoanalysis, culture & society Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 378 - 395
• Main Authors: Young, Lisa Saville, Sweeney, Siobhán Kinahan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Palgrave Macmillan UK 01-09-2024; Palgrave Macmillan
• Subjects: Anthropology; Babies; Caregivers; Children & youth; Cultural Studies; Discourse analysis; Employment; Industrialized nations; Intervention; Low income groups; Maternity & paternity leaves; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mental health care; Original Article; Psychoanalysis; Psychotherapy; low-income mothers; mentalization; psychosocial; discourse analysis; sociocultural responsiveness
• ISSN: 1088-0763; 1543-3390
• DOI: 10.1057/s41282-024-00454-4

We demonstrate the value of a rapprochement between psychoanalytic work aimed at supporting marginalized mothers and discursive accounts of low-income mothers, providing a psychosocial analysis of data from an interview study with six low-income South African mothers. Employing discourse analysis, we show how instrumental mothering is a dominant and precarious construction in these mothers’ talk. We use the concept of mentalization to track the affective work that accompanies the interactional emergence of this instrumental mothering discourse in a particular interview encounter. The implications of the research are discussed in the light of increasing demands for sociocultural responsive research and clinical practice.