“…Aspects of My Life that I am trying to Understand better”: Reinterpreting the Misinterpreted Mother in Doris Lessing’s under My Skin and the Grass is Singing

Abstract

With the application of psychoanalytic and feminist tradition, the psychotherapeutic aspect of interpreting the mother, concept of motherhood and the phenomenon of mothering using feminist tradition is analyzed in this paper. Doris Lessing, through her self-representational writing, fictive protagonists (based on herself and her mother) and by declaring in the later part of her life that her mother was a personality that demanded more thinking, understanding and empathy on her part instead of repulsion, hatred and fear to be like her which is called matrophobia, it can be stated that this psychotherapy of matrophobia (Ashraf 77) is Lessing’s predominant concern in both her novels and autobiographies. However, there are means through which the works emerges out to be psychotherapeutic and tracing out those modes and exploration of the therapy of matrophobia is the primary concern of this research paper.