Naomi Stadlen
(25 November 1942 – 6 June 2025)
On Mother-and-Baby Love
How Naomi Stadlen validated mothers
by reporting both their reports
and her own observations
of their relationships with their babies
(thus scientifically refuting ‘scientific’ theories
of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, et al.)
Lauren Porter Anthony Stadlen
conduct by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 301
Sunday 26 April 2026
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
(celebrating 30th anniversary of
Inner Circle Seminar No. 1
on Sunday 21 April 1996)
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| Naomi Stadlen (25 November 1942 – 6 June 2025) Photograph by Anthony Stadlen 2 April 2022 |
Naomi Stadlen was born on 25 November 1942 and died on 6 June 2025.
She conducted three acclaimed 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 (a critique, with Anthony Stadlen)
No. 261 13 September 2020 Doing ‘Nothing’: The Phenomenology of Mothering and of Psychotherapy
She attended 297 of the 298 Inner Circle Seminars held 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 her first grandson.
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, or was hesitating, to speak was overlooked or cut short.
Her writings, her therapy, her seminars, her Mothers Talking groups over thirty-five years, and her teaching at various colleges and universities, were based on tireless phenomenological attentiveness to what mothers and babies actually do, and say they do.
She wrote, when introducing her own 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.
Today’s Inner Circle Seminar No. 301 celebrates Naomi’s work as well as the 30th anniversary of the first Inner Circle Seminar on 21 April 1996.
It is conducted by her colleagues: her friend Lauren Porter and her husband Anthony Stadlen.
Lauren, who will be with us for the first half of this seminar during her night in New Zealand, convened in November 2008 in Auckland, NZ an extraordinary conference, The Meaning of Motherhood, with Naomi as central figure.
Lauren 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. Lauren 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 6 years her work has been in the disability sector.
Mother, grandmother, existential psychotherapist, supervisor, teacher, and bestselling author Naomi Stadlen practised, supervised, and taught psychotherapy and motherhood and family studies, as well as, especially, conducting her weekly discussion groups Mothers Talking for thirty-five years, until shortly before her death.
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)
These books are loved and revered, in their original unique English, and in translations in many languages, by mothers round the world who feel validated by them.
From 1993 until shortly before her death she practised as an existential psychotherapist, supervisor, and teacher. She taught psychotherapy and counselling at Birkbeck College and the College of North East London; and, nineteen times, she taught the existential phenomenology of families, especially the work of R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson, at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London, where she also supervised many doctoral theses.
She edited journals and published many articles in other journals. 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, 4 January 2021).
Today’s seminar will draw on Naomi Stadlen’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: What is motherly love?
This means 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, rather than to what self-appointed ‘experts’ in prestigious textbooks
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.’
Professor 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.
Naomi Stadlen, in her 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. She then finds that Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, had also marvelled that in Danish a mother makes ‘Hjerterum’ for her new baby, no matter how many babies or how little space she actually has.
We are far, here, from technological ‘toolkits’ for ‘childcare’ and ‘mental health’ taught by ‘health professionals’ and ‘parenting counsellors’.
It is not generally realised that Naomi Stadlen’s books do not merely offer a different approach to various mother-and-baby advice books. They actually present evidence, carefully collected over thirty-five years from her phenomenological studies of mothers and babies, which scientifically refutes a number of widely accepted, even revered, but absurdly and rashly general – and frankly ignorant – theories of ‘authorities’ like Freud, Klein, Winnicott – and many others. We shall demonstrate this today.
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 review by Jacqueline Banerjee of her last book, A Grand Quarrel: Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale and mothers today (2025), at
https://www.victorianweb.org/
You are warmly invited to attend, 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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