The dead mother complex is a clinical condition described by André Green involving an early and destructive identification with the figure of a "dead" – or rather depressed and emotionally unavailable – mother.
Green introduced the concept in an essay which was written in French in 1980, published in 1983, and translated into English in 1986.
[2] The impact on the child, when it finds itself unable to restore a feeling contact, is the internalisation of a hard unresponsive emotional core, which fosters a destructive form of narcissism,[3] contributes to attachment disorders,[4] and reveals itself as a major resistance to progress in the transference.
Later writers have argued for differentiating a range of responses within the dead mother complex, reserving the name dead mother syndrome for the most acute form.
[6] Sylvia Plath's writing has been linked to the dead mother complex.