Exploring the Maternal Instincts in Ashley Audrain’s The Push: A Freudian Psychoanalytic Examination

Abstract

Ashley Audrain’s The Push (2021) exposes the psychological intricacies of maternal identity, challenging the conventional view of motherhood as an innate and rewarding vocation. The study looks at how Blythe, the main character, deals with the tension between her unconscious fears, worries, and suppressed trauma and society’s expectations of motherhood. The id, ego, and superego, which make up Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the mind, provide light on Blythe’s battle with maternal impulses, significantly how her unresolved childhood events affect how she views herself as a mother. The paper investigates how Blythe’s inability to balance her ingrained worries and concerns with society’s expectations of parenting results in a broken sense of self. In the end, The Push emphasises how important it is to recognise maternal mental health and redefine conventional ideas of spontaneous parenting. The present study examines how Audrain employs psychoanalysis to look at the darkest aspects of the human psyche via the prism of Sigmund Freud’s core ideas, including the unconscious, repression, the Oedipus complex, and the Thanatos. The paper further examines the novel’s critique of idealized motherhood as well as the intergenerational transmission of psychological trauma.