Naomi Stadlen
(25 November 1942 – 6 June 2025)
On Mothering
Is motherly love ambivalent?
Lauren Porter Anthony Stadlen
conduct by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 301
Sunday 28 June 2026
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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| Naomi Stadlen |
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Lauren Porter, who will be co-conducting the first half of this seminar, trained as a psychotherapist in the USA, then moved to Germany, and finally settled in New Zealand, where she has resided with her family since 2002. She is a registered clinical social worker and mother of two. Her professional life has largely focussed on therapeutic support for infants, children and their families, with her PhD research centred on first-time mothers of prematurely born infants. For the past six years her work has been in the disability sector.
In 2008 Lauren convened an extraordinary conference, The Meaning of Motherhood, with Naomi Stadlen as central speaker, in Auckland, New Zealand. Naomi’s bestselling book What Mothers Do – especially when it looks like nothing had been published in 2004.
Lauren and Naomi became close friends and continued an intensive discussion about motherhood until Naomi’s death last year.
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Naomi was born on 25 November 1942 and died on 6 June 2025. Her five books on motherhood are loved by mothers (and others) round the world.
She wrote in 2004 (when she had written and published only the first of her five books):
Naomi’s life turned out very differently from the way she thought it would. She thought she would work very hard and create a successful career. However, meeting her husband and having three children changed her values. Family life was wonderful, yet she often felt disrespected as a mother by the culture in which she lived. When her children were older, she became a La Leche League leader. She started Mothers Talking in 1991 - a weekly discussion group for mothers in London to explore how it feels to become a mother. She became an existential psychotherapist, and specialises in working with individual mothers, or parents. She teaches courses on family relationships. She also teaches Wu Style Tai Chi to mothers. Eventually, she wrote What Mothers Do - Especially When It Looks Like Nothing (2004). It’s a study of what she has seen many mothers do without giving advice on what any mother ‘ought’ to do. Publishers assured her that mothers would not buy a book that gave no advice - but mothers have proved these publishers wrong. Naomi was moved to discover how many mothers have felt supported by reading about other mothers. She loved listening to mothers talking because she believed that there is much more to learn about what mothers do.
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Naomi participated in 297 of the 298 of the Inner Circle Seminars convened by her husband Anthony Stadlen during her lifetime, from No. 1 on 21 April 1996 to No. 298 on 30 March 2025. The only one she missed, No. 66, was on 16 March 2003, when she was in New York for the birth of her first grandson.
She conducted or co-conducted four of the 297 herself (including two attended by mothers with their breastfeeding babies as well as by psychotherapists and other professionals):
No. 77 25 April 2004 Listening to Mothers
No. 125 16 March 2008 Merleau-Ponty’s The Child’s Relations with Others: a critique (she co-conducted with Anthony Stadlen)
No. 161 13 March 2011 Locked Up: 'Patients' and their Gaolers. 1. Vladimir Bukowsky (she co-conducted morning session with William Hopkins)
No. 261 13 September 2020 Doing ‘Nothing’: The Phenomenology of Mothering and of Psychotherapy (online seminar by Zoom)
When she was not conducting, she was a gentle but firm presence in the seminars, taking great care that nobody who wanted, or was hesitating, to speak was overlooked or cut short, and only then making her own sensitively timed insightful and original contributions.
Her writings, including her five books; her practice and supervision of existential psychotherapy; her seminars; her Mothers Talking groups, held each week for thirty-five years; and her teaching at various colleges and universities – all were highly original, and based on tireless phenomenological attentiveness to, and delight in, what mothers and babies actually do. Mothers all over the world say they are profoundly grateful for these books, for Mothers Talking, and for her talks, articles, podcasts, etc.
She wrote, to introduce her own third Inner Circle Seminar, No. 261, ‘Doing Nothing’, on 30 September 2020:
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.
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Today’s Inner Circle Seminar No. 301 will include a general appreciation of Naomi’s extraordinary lifetime’s work. But we shall focus on her critique of the widely held concept of ‘maternal ambivalence’. This doctrine, propounded by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and countless present-day psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychologists, as well as by journalists and ‘lay’ people, asserts that every mother’s ‘love’ for her baby is necessarily complemented or balanced by her ‘hate’.
The English psychoanalyst Winnicott pronounced in his enormously influential paper ‘Hate in the Countertransference’ (1947) that every mother ‘hates her infant from the word go’. As Naomi points out in What Mothers Do – especially when it looks like nothing (2004: 169-70), he gives no evidence for this but, rather, a set of eighteen alleged ‘reasons why a mother hates her baby’. One ‘reason’ he gives is that the baby ‘hurts her nipples even by suckling, which is at first a chewing act’. This is, as Naomi writes, an empirically false ‘observation’ by this paediatrician who is widely regarded as a sage authority on mothers and babies, and indeed did often make interesting observations about them, but had no children of his own and was sometimes curiously wide of the mark, as here. Another ‘reason’ Winnicott gives why a mother ‘hates her baby’ is that ‘she mustn’t eat him or trade in sex with him’. Rozsika Parker, in her book Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (1995: 99), implicitly criticises Winnicott – not for not giving evidence (which she does not mention), but (as Naomi observes) for what Parker sees as his unjustified implication that ‘hate’ but not ‘love’ requires justification by ‘reasons’.
Today, a ‘mentally healthy’ mother is expected by ‘health professionals’ (and indeed by many ‘lay’ people) to experience ‘ambivalence’, meaning both ‘love’ and ‘hate’, towards her baby. It is assumed that where there is ‘love’ there must be ‘hate’. Not to feel such ‘hate’ is to be in ‘unhealthy’ ‘denial’. Mothers who do not admit to feeling ‘hate’ for their babies are pitied and made to feel guilty by psychotherapists, writers of advice columns, ‘sophisticated’ mothers, and ‘friends’.
Of course, Naomi acknowledged that some mothers are indeed ambivalent. But she questioned that all are, or that they are necessarily so. In today’s seminar we shall explore the arguments and evidence that have been adduced for primary maternal ambivalence, as well as Naomi’s contradicting evidence.
In What Mothers Do, Chapter 9, ‘What is Motherly Love?’, Naomi closely examines the published writings of a number of mothers who report feeling ambivalent to their babies, and notes that each mother also reports that she experiences the baby as part of herself, not a separate person. It is not surprising that, as Naomi points out, Winnicott, an advocate of ambivalence, also describes a baby as part of its mother.
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As a mother, grandmother, breastfeeding counsellor, existential psychotherapist, supervisor, teacher, and author Naomi practised, supervised, and taught psychotherapy and motherhood and family studies, as well as conducting her weekly discussion groups Mothers Talking for thirty-five years, until shortly before her death.
Naomi had been profoundly influenced by the childbirth books and teaching of her friends and colleagues Sheila Kitzinger and Janet Balaskas, and by countless discussions with them. From them she learned how to give birth with joy herself. Janet, who had founded the Active Birth Centre in London, invited Naomi in 1990 to start a weekly group at the Centre. Naomi called it Mothers Talking. She went on to start several additional Mothers Talking groups, and after thirty-five years was still hosting a small international Mothers Talking group on Zoom until a few weeks before she died.
Naomi edited for some years the journal, Feedback, of the British branch of La Leche League, the international breastfeeding organisation.
Her five books are:
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)A Grand Quarrel: Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale and mothers today (2025)
Naomi’s books are nothing like the standard ‘child-care’ books with their bullet-points signalling ‘advice’ to mothers. Nor do they resemble the pseudo-scientific tomes which often state general theories about mothers and babies without evidence. Indeed, she frequently disproved such general theories by the correct scientific method of producing counter-examples, easily discovered by simply listening to what mothers reported.
Naomi had been one of the first intake of fifty students at the newly founded University of Sussex in 1961. She was the only student to take the course in existentialism. Her degrees were in history and for her thesis she had undertaken research on the seventeenth-century Jansenist theologian Martin de Barcos. As Professor Richard Smith (see below) pointed out, What Mothers Do must surely be the first ‘child-care’ book to acknowledge a debt to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.
Naomi wrote (What Mothers Do, p. 9):
From his [Thucydides’] disciplined writing I learned how important it is to listen to a variety of discordant voices – and to be especially careful not to distort them, not to reduce them to one uniform harmonious choir.
Her books are truly historical and scientific because of their careful sustained presentation of accounts by mothers which she elicited phenomenologically over thirty-five years just by providing a setting and inviting mothers to talk to each other and to her spontaneously in her weekly Mothers Talking meetings.
She never made audio-recordings of these meetings. She relied entirely on her exact memories of significant passages which she found she was recalling verbatim after the meetings and wrote down. She had developed the skill of writing what she had heard verbatim from her earliest days as a little girl at school, when she was fascinated by what her classmates said in play and conversation. Mothers sometimes recognized when they had been quoted. No mother ever objected or said that she had been misquoted.
These books, in their understated but powerful, ordinary but extraordinary, English, and in translations into many languages, are loved and revered by mothers round the world who feel validated by them.
Naomi’s final, fifth, book, A Grand Quarrel: Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale and mothers today (2025) was many years in preparation, but she intensively researched, wrote, and rewrote it after she was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer in April 2022 and ‘given’ at most a year to live. She was correcting proofs until a few weeks before her death. It differs from her previous four books in that it combines three disciplines: literature, history, and the politics of motherhood. For this reason, most publishers rejected it. Eventually, with only low expectations, in February 2025 she asked Martin Wagner, the brilliant publisher of her fourth book, Why Grandmothers Matter. He immediately saw the importance of A Grand Quarrel; insisted on publishing it as her fifth book; and was able to rush across London to her home with a final copy on 6 June a few weeks before publication day (26 June). She was just able to open her eyes and confirm with a nod that she had seen the copy. Then, a few moments later, she died in her daughter’s arms.
There was a very warm and perceptive review of A Grand Quarrel by Jacqueline Banerjee in The Times Literary Supplement on 15 August 2025 (see below).
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From 1993 until shortly before her death Naomi practised as an existential psychotherapist, supervisor, and teacher. She taught psychotherapy and counselling at Birkbeck College and the College of North East London; and she devised and, nineteen times, taught a module on the existential phenomenology of families, including pioneer family researchers and therapists such as Gregory Bateson, Lyman Wynne, Carl Whitaker, Jay Haley, Murray Bowen, Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir, and especially R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London, where she also supervised many doctoral theses. (Anthony Stadlen taught her course six times when she was too ill to do so at the end of her life.)
She edited journals and herself wrote many journal articles. She wrote introductions to other authors’ books. She was clear that her work was developing and correcting the existential tradition in a hitherto wholly unexplored way.
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 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Naomi’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. Naomi then notes that Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, independently of Coleridge, also marvelled that in Danish a mother makes ‘hjerterum’ for her new baby, and indeed that, as the proverb put it, ‘hvor der er hjerterum, er der husrum’ (‘where there is heartroom there is houseroom’), no matter how many babies or how little space she actually has.
Today’s seminar will draw on Naomi’s decades of listening to mothers, as well as on her practice, supervision and teaching of existential psychotherapy and family studies, to try to answer the question: Is motherly love ambivalent?
We shall attend to what mothers – both as they speak in this seminar and as she reports in her books – say they and their babies and children do. We shall contrast this with what self-appointed ‘experts’ in prestigious textbooks claim they do or urge they should do. The mothers find words, typically simple and subtle, humorous and poetic, humble and unassuming, to describe what often appears never to have been described before.
Naomi’s books are radically different from mother-and-baby advice books. They give no advice at all. At the start of her first book she asked any reader who caught her giving advice to let her know so that she could remove it. This has never happened with any of her books.
The books present evidence, carefully collected and collated over thirty-five years from her phenomenological studies of, and work with, mothers and babies, which scientifically refutes a number of widely accepted, often absurdly general, theories of ‘authorities’ such as Freud, Klein, Winnicott – and many others. These theories have in common a general tendency to denigrate mothers and babies. We shall demonstrate this today.
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Anne Karpf wrote in The Guardian: ‘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.’
Sheila Kitzinger, writer and teacher on childbirth, mother of five, wrote:
Naomi Stadlen writes with understanding, deep insight and humour. This is truly woman-to-woman.
Prof. Thomas Szasz, Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University, NY, wrote:
I love this book [What Mothers Do]. 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.
Prof. Richard Smith, Professor of Education at Durham University, wrote of what he called Naomi’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.
Dame Hilary Mantel, Dame of the British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society, novelist, twice winner of the Booker Prize, wrote:
Naomi’s books on motherhood are full of simple and profound points I had not thought of, and I find them fascinating.
Prof. Dr. Albrecht Hirschmüller, Professor at Institut für Ethik und Geschichte der Medizin, Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Germany, wrote:
Ihre Bücher sind vielen eine große Freude, nicht trotz, sondern weil sie öfter quer zum Zeitgeist denkt.
[(Naomi’s) books are a great joy for many, not despite, but because she often thinks against the Zeitgeist.]
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For more information on Naomi Stadlen see
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=2569ae9a3b&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-f:1846157869563814161&th=199edecd0ea4a111&view=att&zw&disp=inline
and the extended version by Jacqueline Banerjee of her review in The Times Literary Supplement, p. 10, on 15 August 2025, of Naomi’s last book, A Grand Quarrel: Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale and mothers today (2025), at
https://www.victorianweb.org/
You are warmly invited to attend today’s seminar, especially if you are yourself a mother or mother-to-be.
This will be an online seminar, using ZOOM.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, low rates for impecunious mothers and others
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue , London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 iPhone: 07809 433 250
E-mail: 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.
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