“Scene madri”: Visioni psicoanalitiche da Aracoeli a Volver.

The author engages Morante’s novel in a dialogue both with some filmic representations on the theme of the mother (to which the phrase ‘Scene madri’ refers) and with some fundamental concepts of contemporary infant research and psychoanalysis. The essay starts by looking at some mothers in Pasolini’s films (from the Mater Dolorosa of the Vangelo to the Mediterranean Mothers of Mamma Roma and Medea), and claims that Morante was pushed by an almost ancestral urge to move away from the model of the mother of Pasolini’s Classical, Greek, and Christian iconography and to enter a dimension which goes beyond the reassuring polarity between good and bad mother. Aracoeli’s maternal aspects always and at the same time express themselves in the form of a barbaric polytheism and paganism that combines and mixes different genders: hereby their power of disturbance. The essay concludes by exploring the similarities and the differences between this unsettling and queer feature in Morante’s novels and Almodóvar’s films, focusing in particular on Aracoeli and Volver, which both deal with stories of lost mothers who come back and inhabit their children’s life like ghosts.