Chapter 9: Mothers Dealing with Child Abuse: Dynamics of Psychological Processing

Making sense of life events can be understood in terms of meaning construction. This process is approached through semiotic analysis, focusing on the micro-genetic level of psychological experience. This chapter illustrates this analysis taking an extract of therapeutic session with the mothers of sexually abused children. The meaning making process goes by means of dynamics of tension and distancing through particular meaning complexes characterized by ambivalence, vagueness, and opposition. The person copes with uncertainty of immediate future using the temporal stability given by social representations, as cultural tools and semiotic devices. Meaning construction takes place through negotiation between cultural context and personal subjectively lived-through experiences. Some cultural notions of motherhood are particularly considered with the experience of the abuse of one’s child.