Psychoanalysis, the Maternal abject and the
works of
Frida Kahlo
One of Frida Kahlo's most startling works, "My Birth," made in 1932
was in process when Kahlo found out that her mother was dying of cancer. She
completed the painting after the burial; perhaps it is the encapsulation of
her grief and failure that makes the painting so abject. It is a powerful and
eerie scene, one in which Kahlo demonstrates her own separation from her mother
and herself as a non-mother. The scene is a suffocating and horrifying expression
of Kahlo’s abjection and isolation. Above the bed is a religious icon,
a representation of the weeping Virgin of Sorrows, overlooking a stark room
furnished only by a neatly made bed. The birthing mother is dead, as represented
by the sheet covering her head, upper torso and arms. The baby being born from
this dead woman is still born. The baby is Kahlo herself.
In this piece Kahlo illustrates, seemingly painfully, the maternal abject through
the birthing process. Danielle Knafo proposes that the site of much of Kahlo’s
work resides at the separation phase with her mother. She specifically focuses
on the absent mirroring experience, which Kahlo missed and longed for, from
her mother . Mirroring, according to Jacques Lacan is responsible for providing
the infant with its sense of identity and body presence . This is equivalent
to Kristeva’s interpretation of the mapping of the body, which occurs at
the same time as the separation from the mother. Kahlo’s obsession with
mirrors and the numerous self-portraits she painted in her short life echo the
need for her to remind herself that indeed she does exist. Kahlo found in art
the act of creation she dearly wanted and could not have; she says:
“Painting completed my life. I lost three children…Paintings substituted
for all this” 1
As Kristeva stipulates, the aesthetic process is the site of inner conflict,
which the artist tries to harmonise. And indeed, this is the case with Kahlo.
The abject in My birth (the blood, two corpses, the stabbed Virgin of Sorrows,
separation anxiety, and the birthing process), which this painting depicts,
inform my work where symbols of abjection collide in the one image.
©2001 Mireille Astore
1. Knafo, Danielle. In her own image. In Art Criticism. Vol 11, no. 2