Matricide

January 27, 2012:  There was a segment of CBS Morning News this morning previewing tonight’s “48 Hours Mystery” which features a recent case of matricide.  Guest, Richard Schlesinger, pointed to the rise in the incidence of matricide and, in particular, the increased incidence of girls who murder their mothers.  Hosts, Gail King and Rebecca Jarvis, were pondering over the cause of this alarming trend.  My question is:  Horrified and appalled — of course, but why is anyone surprised by this?  Why should we be mystified that children murder their parents when, with every passing year, we hear more stories about parents who murder their children?

A cultural milieu that starves the soul is a cultural milieu that provides tacit “permission” to engage in violence against women in general.  The wide availability of guns and other weapons provides a broad range of means.  Chemical dependency and family dysfunction provide the occasions to pull the trigger when a situation devolves past the tipping point.  Can there be any wonder that both boys and girls attack and murder their mothers when the feminine has been so devalued, damaged, ravaged and twisted by the overly concrete intellectual, rationalistic, rapacious capitalistic mindset of the  patriarchal cultural dominant in the last twelve years — despite the previous 40 years of feminism and “women’s liberation”?  When one combines chemical dependency, dysfunctional and sexually and physically abusive relationships which themselves are the result of the overly rationalistic bias of patriarchal culture, and add to this the “ignition” stressors in the home and cultural environment and the availability of weapons, you have the ingredients for matricide.

Two books come to mind:

“On Matricide, Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother” by Amber Jacobs (Google Books).  A description of the book on the Google website says in part, “Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. . . She argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a post-patriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.”

“Matricide in Language” by Miglena Nikolchina (Google Books) who writes of, “the enigma of the persistent suppression of women's contributions to culture. In spite of the efforts of feminist theory and history to turn the tide, this process is with us still.”