Naomi Stadlen: On Mothering
1. What is motherly love?
Lauren Porter Anthony Stadlen
conduct by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 301
Sunday 26 April 2026
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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| Naomi Stadlen Photograph by Anthony Stadlen |
Anthony Stadlen writes:
Naomi Stadlen died on 6 June 2025. She had attended all but one of the 298 Inner Circle Seminars during her lifetime, from No. 1 on 21 April 1996 to No. 298 on 30 March 2025. She missed only No. 66 on 16 March 2003, when she was in New York for the birth of our first grandson.
She herself conducted three Inner Circle Seminars:
No. 77 25 April 2004 Listening to Mothers
No. 125 16 March 2008 Merleau-Ponty’s The Child’s Relations with Others (with Anthony Stadlen)
No. 261 13 September 2020 Doing ‘Nothing’: The Phenomenology of
Mothering and of Psychotherapy
She was a gentle but firm presence in all the seminars she attended, making insightful and original contributions, and taking great care that nobody who wanted to speak was overlooked or cut short.
She wrote, when introducing her Inner Circle Seminar No 261, ‘Doing Nothing’:
It’s impossible to do nothing. Mothers often say: ‘I’ve got nothing done all day.’ This can’t be a literal statement. It’s a statement of value. While I was writing What Mothers Learn, I noticed many similarities between the work of mothers and that of psychotherapists. Both can feel as if they are ‘doing nothing’ exactly when they are working well. So ‘nothing’ must be ‘something’ that we seem to undervalue. We will use this seminar to identify and explore some of the actions that so easily get dismissed as ‘doing nothing’. Psychotherapists, mothers, and interested others are warmly invited to take part.
Mother, grandmother, existential psychotherapist, supervisor and teacher Naomi Stadlen practised as a therapist and conducted her weekly discussion groups Mothers Talking for thirty-five years, until shortly before her death. Her five books – What Mothers Do: especially when it looks like nothing (2004), How Mothers Love: and how relationships are born (2011), What Mothers Learn: without being taught (2020), Why Grandmothers Matter (2023), and A Grand Quarrel: Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale and mothers today (2025) – are revered, in their original form and in translations in many languages, by mothers round the world who feel validated by them.
She was one of the first From 1993 until shortly before her death she was an existential psychotherapist, supervisor and teacher. She taught psychotherapy and counselling at Birkbeck College and the College of North East London; and, nineteen times, the phenomenology of families, especially the work of Laing and Esterson, at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London.
She edited journals and published many articles. She contributed chapters to books: ‘Families’ (with Anthony Stadlen) in Existential Perspectives on Human Issues, A Handbook for Therapeutic Practice edited by Emmy van Deurzen and Claire Arnold-Baker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); ‘The Challenge of Intimacy: Fear of the Other’ in Existential Perspectives on Relationship Therapy edited by Emmy van Deurzen and Susan Iacovou (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and ‘The Existential Freedom of Mothers’ in The Existential Crisis of Motherhood edited by Claire Arnold-Baker (to be published, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 4 January 2021).
This seminar is a comparative phenomenological study of the work of mothers and psychotherapists, drawing on Naomi Stadlen’s decades of listening to mothers, as well as on her practice, supervision and teaching of existential psychotherapy and family studies.
The seminar will be an examination, in the manner pioneered by Naomi Stadlen in her highly original books, of what mothers and psychotherapists do, which they may experience at times as ‘nothing’.
Why are her extraordinary books on mothers known, translated, and treasured by mothers and others round the world?
The heart of the books is what Hilary Mantel has called, when speaking in Inner Circle Seminar No. 205 about the families in Laing and Esterson’s Sanity, Madness and the Family, ‘the simple words the people speak’: the words of mothers, talking about what they and their babies and children actually do, rather than what textbooks by self-appointed ‘experts’
Anne Karpf wrote: ‘I threw away the baby care manuals ... virtually all of them infantilise mothers.’ But, she wrote, Naomi Stadlen’s What Mothers Do is ‘something miraculous ... brilliantly insightful ... the best book on parenting’. ‘Her book is being passed from mother to mother like contraband.’
Thomas Szasz wrote:
I love this book. A work from a pure heart and informed head. It is at once simple and profound, as is the subject it addresses. It reads as if the author were in the room speaking to the reader. No pseudo-science, no psychobabble. Just the truth.
Richard Smith, Professor of Education at Durham University, wrote of what he called Naomi Stadlen’s ‘philosophy of mothering’ (Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith and Paul Standish, The Therapy of Education, 2007, Basingstoke and NY, Palgrave Macmillan: 213-215):
The new mother has no map, and the available maps that display the techniques of motherhood cannot be trusted. In offering help, Stadlen too acknowledges that the map is under construction. And although she does not say so, the problem is essentially a philosophical one, and her efforts are philosophical in the way that Ludwig Wittgenstein conceived of philosophy as non-dogmatic and therapeutic.
Volume 39, Issue 1, February 2005, p. 179):
Naomi Stadlen argues persuasively in What Mothers Do: especially when it looks like nothing (Piatkus Books, 2004) that motherhood has fallen victim to the language and dominant ideas of our time. When confronted with new challenges, we expect to be trained and equipped with skills to deal with them. As one of her interviewees notes, ‘the dominant culture…is all about planning and controlling’ (p. 48). We are used to jumping through hoops and over hurdles – examinations, Duke of Edinburgh’s awards, applications for jobs and for promotion – and so childbirth too comes to seem another hurdle, after which life will surely go back to normal’ (p. 34). When it turns out, by contrast, that life will never be the same again, we naturally look to the appropriate experts to tell us how to manage, and the bookshops are of course full of guides to the appropriate techniques.Being a mother to a small child, however, ‘is all about feeling your way’, as the same interviewee puts it. According to Stadlen it is less a matter of techniques than of something like responsiveness, a constant alertness and attuning of oneself to the needs and nature of this particular child now, to whom no one else is responsible in the same way. And this is all the more difficult for us to understand because we do not have the words for it: which is why what mothers do can look like nothing from the outside and often feels like not very much from the inside either. At the heart of being a mother is the state which can only be described as ‘Being instantly interruptible’ (the title of Chapter Four): the condition in which she is endlessly there for her child to the point that she may feel she has no life of her own. We have many words for being a bad mother – Stadlen gives a list of over thirty words and phrases – but the list for being a good mother is much shorter and the words (e.g. caring, nurturing, patient) do not so much describe what mothers do as what they are like as persons (pp. 18–19).Part of what is at issue here is that our world recognises and values busy-ness and activity, but mothering requires a kind of passivity, being there for the baby rather than exercising techniques on her. It requires the mother almost ‘to loosen her active conscious mode and sink into something older and simpler in order to get close to the world of her baby’ (p. 89). We generally expect people to become more focused and confident as they begin to get the measure of new demands made on them, but this may not be the mother’s experience, and she may be right not to experience things like this:If she feels disorientated, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her. If she really considered herself an expert, or if her ideas were set, she would find it very hard to adapt to her individual baby. … Each child will be a little different and teach her something new. She needs to feel uncertain in order to be flexible. So, although it can feel so alarming, the ‘all-at-sea’ feeling is appropriate. Uncertainty is a good starting point for a mother. Through uncertainty, she can begin to learn (p. 45).In this implicitly Wittgensteinian way Stadlen sets about the difficult task of assembling the reminders that help us to achieve a new way of looking at things (Philosophical Investigations 1, 127 and 401). It is the essentially philosophical business of exploring ‘what it makes sense to say’, as Peter Winch put it (The Idea of a Social Science, p. 72). In its emphasis on alertness and attunement, flexibility and the ethical nature of motherhood (see especially p. 106) Stadlen’s description comes very close to the Aristotelian picture of phronesis or practical wisdom. She claims an historian’s rather than a philosopher’s background but the whole book is of great philosophical, as well as educational, interest. And thanks apparently to Thucydides (this must surely be the first time that Thucydides has been credited as a major influence on a book on childcare), it is well and sensitively written.
This is a sensitive and perceptive review; its author clearly understands that Naomi Stadlen’s books are not on ‘childcare’, in the degraded sense in which this term is used today: it was manuals on ‘childcare’ that Anne Karpf ‘threw away’.
Stadlen’s second book, How Mothers Love – and how relationships are born (2011), uses Coleridge’s term ‘heartroom’ to describe how a mother prepares to welcome her baby, and then finds that Kierkegaard’, in Works of Love, had also marvelled at how also Danish the ‘Hjerterum’ (‘heartroom’) that a mother makes for her baby, a word also used (coined?)
Later in German (‘Herzraum’) in a poem by Rilke and an essay on Rilke by Heidegger.
Her third book, What Mothers Learn – without being taught (2020)
We are far, here, from technological ‘toolkits’ for ‘childcare’ and ‘mental health’ taught by ‘health professionals’ and ‘parenting counsellors’.
Naomi Stadlen conducted three Inner Circle Seminars:
No. 77, on 25 April 2004, Listening to Mothers;
No. 125, on 16 March 2008 (with Anthony Stadlen), Merleau-Ponty: ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’;
No. 261, on 13 September 2020, Doing ‘Nothing’: The Phenomenology of Mothering and of Psychotherapy.
It would be a mistake to think that Seminar No. 125 was intended as praise of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’, which is often taken as the golden touch of a phenomenological philosopher (who has the additional magic of being French) on this subject. Rather, it was intended to demonstrate the feebleness of this over-rated work.
This will be an online seminar, using ZOOM.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue , London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 iPhone: 07809 433 250
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com
E-mail: stadlen@aol.com or: stadlenanthony@gmail.com
For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and universities.
Her fifth book, A Grand Quarrel: Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale and mothers today, was published on 26 June 2025, shortly after her death. Her publisher Martin Wagner of Montag and Martin had rushed across London to her home to show her a copy on 6 June. She was just able to open her eyes and confirm that she had seen it; then, a few moments later, she died. Jennifer Banerjee wrote a fine review of the book in The Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 2025, p. 15.
Our seminars resumed with No. 299, in the subseries on Heidegger’s Zollikon seminars, on 7 September 2025.
Today, 21 September 2025, we start a new subseries exploring Naomi Stadlen s work with, and writings on, mothering. s and their babies and children. work we start a new subseries is the 57th anniversary of 21 September 1968 when Naomi Jacoby first met Anthony Stadlen. He had advertised an Existential Teaching Centre in the New Statesman. She was the only person to reply. It transpired that they lived three doors apart. In 191 she had been the only member of the first intake of fifty students at the new University of Sussex to take its course in existentialism. The ‘Existential Teaching Centre’ never came into being, but she and Stadlen married, had children and grandchildren, and became existential teachers and therapists.
reality, and I first met, Inner Circle Seminar No. 300, What is Motherly Love?, is the first of a subseries of seminars devoted to her pioneering work on motherhood and psychotherapy. We shall examine her five books and many papers containing her reflections on the detailed evidence which she gathered from her discussions with mothers over 35 years. We shall show that this lucidly, gently, steadily presented evidence not merely challenges but scientifically disproves widely accepted general but unevidenced assertions by ‘authorities’ such as Freud, Klein, Winnicott, et al.
This is an online seminar, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; payable in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue , London N22 7XE
For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.
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