Beauty and the Aesthetic Impact of the Bejeweled Mother: Discussion of Papers by Debra Roth and Elaine Freedgood.

I add a developmental perspective to the picture Roth and Freedgood have elaborated regarding the significance of surfaces. With Roth's attention to the analytic couple and adult intersubjective interaction, I include the mother-infant dyad—what I have written about, following Winnicott, as the "nursing couple." I now employ Meltzer's evocative concept regarding the aesthetic impact of the mother. From this perspective regarding the early maternal relation, I then address the anxieties that Freedgood, especially, highlights in relation to culture and gender. I emphasize that we communicate to and with a maternal object that is herself a complex object both in her surface and in her interior. I contend that jewelry is a concrete representation of the mother's most interesting bodily surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]