Starting from the mid-1890s, Freud assumed that the trauma whose memory was repressed by neurotics was of a sexual nature. More specifically, he claimed to obtain from his patients’ memories of sexual abuse suffered in early childhood at the hands of an adult pervert, most of the time the father. In late 1897, he abandoned this “seduction theory,” having realized, he said, that his patients’ memories were in fact fantasies expressing an infantile sexual wish to be fondled by a parent. This reversal, which marks the beginning of Freud’s theories about infantile perverse sexuality and the Oedipus complex, was due to his adoption of his friend Wilhelm Fliess’ speculations regarding biorythms, themselves based on Ernst Haeckel’s “biogenetic law”: the individual development (ontogenesis) of an organism recapitulates the development of the species (phylogenesis). Hence Freud’s theory of the various stages (oral, anal, phallic, etc.) of libidinal development, which was not based, as he claimed in the “Little Hans” case, on an empirical investigation of children’s sexuality but on purely speculative (and since then debunked) biological assumptions.

In the surrealist revolt against the state, the Church, and the family, the mother figure became a key target, both as custodian of bourgeois-patriarchal values and as symbol of Catholic doctrine. In works such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s L’age d’or (1930), and Joyce Mansour’s Jules César (1955), mothers are attacked and violated, suffering a fate similar to those of the detested mother figures in the fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Yet not all mothers in surrealist art and literature are portrayed in such unequivocally negative terms. Focusing on Leonor Fini’s Mourmour, conte pour enfants velus (1976) and Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend (2004), this chapter traces an alternative history of surrealist representations of the mother, one in which this figure is rendered more ambiguous and at times even invested with revolutionary potential. These novels, the chapter suggests, elaborate representations of maternity in critical dialogue with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As such they resonate to some extent with the (largely contemporaneous) work of French feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, in which the concept of maternity becomes configured as an alternative to the phallocentric symbolic order.