Yeah, I’m sure that Klein is sometimes mentioned simply as “Klein”. What I wrote about the first name and surname was based upon the particular course I did, in which “Klein” never seemed mentioned without being prefixed with “Melanie”, whilst the male theorists seemed almost invariably to go solely by their surnames. My reading around the subject generally revealed the same thing, but I never researched the matter in a systematic way… and the first name/surname thing is not universal.

Freud is a bit different in that only Sigmund is just “Freud” whilst Anna, Lucian and Clement all receive a first name. Of those, only Anna was a woman.

I’ve noticed, in other contexts, that women are more likely to be cited as first name plus surname than are men. Artists are a case in point.

And, on artists, I noticed something else that seemed interesting. I own more than 20 volumes in Taschen’s Basic Art series. (These are pleasing and inexpensive books of a little less than 100 pages, each devoted to an individual artist.) Of the volumes I own, all but two take as their frontispieces a reproduction of one of the artist’s works. The two exceptions are the two female artists (Kahlo and de Lempicka). In both of these volumes, the frontispiece is a photograph of the artist. Not only is the series mostly given over to the work of men, but the exceptions are flagged with photographs of the women — placed at the start of their books.

btw – Kleinian bra = awesome.

I’ve definitely seen her referred to as Klein, probably in an academic article though. Freud should really be stripped of his surname-status since he founded his dynasty of Anna Freud and Lucian Freud. Cf. also Clement Freud, of course!

Talking of nurturing, good/bad mothers and psychoanalytic theorists, I’m reminded that Melanie Klein wrote of the “good breast” and the “bad breast”. I thought that there should be a range of psychoanalytic lingerie, including the Kleinian bra. (I envisaged this as having a red/black lace cup for the bad breast, and a white cup for the good breast.) The range needed to include a Freudian slip, although I never had any idea as to how that would look.

I note that it seems customary to refer to Melanie Klein thus (including her first name) although the leading male psychoanalytic theorists generally go by their surname alone (Freud, Jung, Adler, etc.). (In fact, I can’t remember what Adler’s first name was.) Perhaps the (unconscious?) idea is to flag that Klein’s ideas are those of a woman and (for that reason) suspect. Or is this notion hysterical?

Only just saw your first comment re: counselling. I recently read Coetzee’s novel ‘Disgrace’, and there’s a bit in it where the narrator’s daughter, having been gang-raped and impregnated, asserts that she’s still going to have the baby. ‘The child of one of those men?? How will you love it?’ etc is the father’s recurrent cry, to which she responds: ‘Nature will take over’ – she’ll love it by virtue of the maternal ‘instinct’, and be a good mother because that’s how it should be. A very troubling situation all round.

Maternal failure is still one of the most problematic issues: think of Lady Macbeth talking about dashing her baby’s brains out while it suckles (and then ‘unsex me here’, ‘take my milk for gall’). All those cases of mothers killing their children and then themselves that seem strangely rife at the moment. And, indeed, the archetypal non-nurturing ‘nanny’ Louise Woodward, supposedly ‘the most notorious criminal convicted in Massachusetts’. Then there are sort of ‘comedy’ bad mothers like Joan Crawford (Mommie Dearest) and various other Hollywood figures. There’s an idea that if you’re not maternal, that’s somehow unnatural. By extension, I reckon *being* a nanny is a job-title few women relish – it’s got that association with doing what women have ‘always’ done. And the ‘manny’, of course…

M was indeed quite problematic, but most Alphabet choices are partly made with reference to other things I’ve done or will be doing – no ‘maid’, because I’d done ‘girl’, would be doing ‘nanny’ and will be looking at virginity again. No ‘mother’ because I’d done some of the word’s nuances under Hysteria, and there’s not a great deal else to say about it that can’t be unexpectedly sprung on people under different words (Infant was a big ‘social history’ one for mother, and O, U and F all look at the science / anatomy behind it). Although I was disappointed that doing ‘Marriage’ meant I could no longer have an article beginning with Niles Crane from Frasier: ‘I must warn you that, while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian… so there’ll be no blaming Mother today…’

Also cf ‘girl’ – ‘the shop girl’, the ‘check-out girl’. Along with ‘maid’ and ‘nanny’ it feels to me like a diminished form of femininity: the not-quite-adult by virtue of serving.

Yeah. And, like ‘nanny’, it’s a word that only comes to mean ‘servant’ because of its association with a ‘generic woman’. All women are servants and mothers. To put it very crudely.

Another interesting “M” word is “Maid”, which can either mean a virgin or a female servant. In the context of “Nanny” it forms part of the curious compound “Nursemaid”, of which the first half is associated with motherhood and the second with virginity.

M must have been a difficult letter to choose for this alphabet. “Mother” is one of several interesting alternatives to “marriage”. I read somewhere that the word for “mother” in all known languages begins with an “M” sound. (I’m not sure whether this is true, but it’s certainly true of languages from more than one language group.) The author who made that assertion thought that the “M” was in imitation of a baby’s first cry.

I am assuming that ‘nanny’ as ‘grandmother’ must have a relation to ‘nanny’ as ‘generic (maternal) woman’ which would indeed suggest it has a lower class connotation. That said, my grandparents were one from each class, as it were, and very firmly ‘Grandma’ and ‘Granny’ (not hard to figure out which is which, I suspect).

As for the social class to which the wet-nurses belonged, I think it may be higher than one might think – they could, obviously, be working class, but they could also achieve a degree of social mobility in the process of wet nursing ‘to the rich and famous’ that suggests they were not regarded with contempt by their employers. The lactating issue puzzled me too – in Romeo and Juliet, the Nurse talks about her own dead child (by her husband, also dead), who was ‘of an age’ with Juliet, and I think we can safely assume this was why she was lactating (it also creates a sense of her relationship with her charge – reciprocal surrogacy. Shakespeare is clever.). However, lactating can be induced without having a child to start it off, and is technically possible post-menopause. I should therefore imagine that while a proportion of wet nurses probably did get into it as a way of ‘not wasting the milk’, a significant alternative just went into it as a career (it was a very lucrative one: if your husband was a labourer, and you were a wet nurse, you were the one bringing home the bacon – interesting from the point of view of women in the workplace / women’s pay there, perhaps).

As I said above, I also wonder about the status of the ‘dry nurse’ nanny in (certainly 19th & 20th century) culture – I get the impression from books of the period that she had an authority stronger than, say, the cook, but that her position was one of curious liminality: part inside the most private areas of the family (the nursery) and part domestic servant.

Of course, another issue we haven’t tackled is the nurse in Freud – the Rat Man, for example, talks about his childhood nurse as this sexually unrestrained loony, who used to make him crawl under her skirts and get her off. However much that’s the ramblings of someone by definition mentally disturbed, he still felt he could say it. (That links very interestingly as an ideological standpoint with your family history, actually – if nurses are sexually unrestrained, they are also sexually available). And the connection with the Freudian mother there is interesting too – the nurse serves a purpose as the ‘bad mother’, so that the ‘good mother’ can be always good in the eyes of her children. Cf. also stepmothers in fairy tales. But that’s a topic for another day.