Michaela Chamberlain: Misogyny in the Countertransference

Michaela Chamberlain trained at The Bowlby Centre and studied in the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL. Shortly after qualifying at The Bowlby Centre in 2016, she started teaching Freud and attachment theory and became chair of The Bowlby Centre. She worked as an honorary psychotherapist in two NHS trusts for several years. She has presented clinical papers at public forums, lectures internationally, and has been published in various journals. She is the author of Misogyny in Psychoanalysis (2022) and On Resisting Women (2026).

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Few concepts in psychoanalysis have been as influential in shaping cultural understandings of motherhood as the “good enough mother.” Introduced by one of the Fathers of psychoanalysis, Donald Winnicott, the concept offered a seemingly compassionate alternative to impossible ideals of maternal perfection. Yet embedded within psychoanalytic accounts of motherhood is a more troubling history: one in which mothers have been positioned as the primary site of blame, scrutiny, and therapeutic intervention.

This paper revisits Winnicott’s celebrated 1947 paper, Hate in the Counter-Transference, alongside Amanda Montei’s contemporary memoir Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent and Control. Winnicott’s essay is perhaps best remembered for its provocative acknowledgement that mothers hate their babies for many reasons, a claim that sought to normalise maternal ambivalence. Montei, writing nearly eighty years later, gives language to a different but related experience: being “touched out” a phrase that went viral because it articulated something many mothers recognised immediately but had rarely seen acknowledged.

We’ll be talking about mothers being ’touched out’, why psychoanalytic papers make therapists want to 'tap out’ and if like JB Pontalis did, we should all be avoiding psychoanalytic conferences.

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This is an in-person event only.