Far be it from me to disagree with Toni Morrison. I might just add that the loneliest woman in the world is a mother without a close mother friend. It is not an original feminist critique that historically psychoanalysis has had much to say about the infinite ways a mother’s failing can forge her child’s psychic destiny, with less examination given to understanding and improving the contexts which can support a mother-baby’s thriving. Yes, there is no such thing as a baby, but there is also no such thing as a good enough mother without other mothers who see her. Mothers need mothers, and not just their own.

I gave birth to my first child, a beautiful baby boy, in April. My analysis is of course essential in organizing me through the vulnerable and transformative postpartum crucible. But it is my new mommy’s group that offers me healing community during this personally and collectively turbulent time. As all good things must be these days, we meet on Zoom, once a week for the first year of our baby’s life. Unlike most offerings for new mothers that focus on the baby’s development, or bonding “mommy and me” activities, this is a support group with the focus on the mother’s experience. There are no deep interpretations, no psychoeducation on attachment or mentalization. There is empathy, advice, and belonging. It’s a chorus of motherhood me-toos. We talk about the miracles and madness of this experience – the loss and gain of it all. If we wanted to be analytic snobs we might call it unsophisticated, but as snobs always are, especially analytic ones, we would be so mistaken. A group of women who come together each week to hold one another through new motherhood may be what saves the world.

The empathic container of this circle transforms shame, tempers terror, and heals the isolation of this, the true impossible profession. Every time a mother in the circle shares her vulnerability and is embraced by the group’s love her own well is replenished. After receiving the group medicine, we each return to our children more whole, allowing our babies to internalize a more resourced, regulated, and real maternal object. The inner world of a child today creates the outside world of tomorrow. Widening circles of belonging for mothers make that future look brighter, kinder, and more hopeful.

Bell Hooks soulfully diagnoses so much of the cruelty and chaos of the world today as a product of lovelessness. Analysts know that often lovelessness is related to a motherless experience. One of my favorite aspects of psychoanalytic thinking is the inquiry into locating the deepest and widest view of a phenomenon. In practicing this art of both zooming in and out, every child’s motherless experience is revealed within the larger framework of that mother’s loneliness or belonging, and in her mother’s experience, and her mother’s, and on and on.

So much of the poverty of modern life and the shallowness of popular psychology involves collapsing things into straight lines and boxes. Screens, DSM diagnoses, Amazon packages, a social media profile picture, individual psychological arcs. The sharp edge of boxy individualism cuts off connection and breeds the isolation of lovelessness and motherlessness. It’s the wrong shape to find community in turbulent times. It is in circles that beautiful things are born and expand. It’s in a circle of mothers that we can nurture new life: our children’s and our own.