Regardless of the eventual outcome of the Lindsay Clancy case—a conviction or acquittal—as a Jungian psychoanalyst, I’m not surprised the case has become organized around a striking binary. Clancy is cast in two opposing roles: either the evil, monstrous mother—because a loving mother could never kill her children—or the victimized, mentally ill mother, once a loving mother like any other, who was overtaken by mental illness and failed by psychiatry and the mental health system. That the jurors struggled to reach a unanimous decision reflects our cultural splitting and society’s struggle with motherhood.
A quick summary: Lindsay Clancy admitted to strangling her three children, Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months), on January 24, 2023, before she threw herself out of her bedroom window in a suicide attempt that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Beginning in September 2022, she was seen by at least six clinicians, treated with 14 medications, and sought help at clinics, ERs, and psychiatric hospitals, yet her symptoms became worse. Her legal defense claims she suffered from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis that, ultimately, led her to believe she heard a voice telling her to kill the children.
The public response mirrors the psychological splitting that surrounds motherhood itself. Perhaps making Clancy either perpetrator or victim is a defense against confronting something disturbing and culturally unspeakable: the shadow side of motherhood and the reality of maternal ambivalence.
A loving mother can feel deeply devoted to her children while also feeling consumed. She may struggle to separate from them yet desperately need the space. Love coexists with anger and resentment, and fantasies of escape provide some way out of the daily grind of motherhood for many mothers.
Acknowledging this is emphatically not the same as suggesting that ordinary maternal ambivalence leads mothers to kill their children. It overwhelmingly does not. But refusing to acknowledge these challenging experiences is part of motherhood, which wears so many ordinary women down, and is part of the fervor of this case. Minimizing the influence of these factors on mothers perpetuates an idealized, inhuman image of motherhood, making the reality of ordinary maternal stress and aggression harder to acknowledge and integrate, one that is relegated to either the mentally ill or evil mother.
Nor am I minimizing or denying Clancy was experiencing mental illness. While I did not assess her, so I cannot know, symptoms of mental illness—severe psychiatric distress and deterioration—are well supported. However, concluding that her actions are fully explained by mental illness is more culturally digestible and certainly more legally defensible than acknowledging how ordinary maternal conflicts that most mothers experience are also an influential part of this story. A loving mother could only do this because of mental illness, and that narrative preserves the idea of the idealized mother.
Maternal Identity, Separation, and the Mother Complex
The record documents Clancy’s concerns about being a good mother, intense anxiety about Callan and his sleep, shortchanging her other children, and difficulties separating from her children. Following Cora’s birth, records also report that she had return-to-work anxiety; after Dawson’s birth, she exhibited similar difficulty and attended therapy, but did so only briefly; and, finally, she experienced severe anxiety about returning to work, which precipitated psychiatric treatment after Callan, and she ultimately never returned to work.1
I raise this as an example of the value of exploring her individual circumstances, beyond her symptoms. From the available public evidence, it appears that the more difficult her separation from her children became, the more her identity seemed to revolve around motherhood, while other parts of her identity became less evident.
This leads us to ask: What happens psychologically when a mother feels she cannot leave her children, and/or what happens for mothers who have no choice but to leave their children, yet they also cannot continue existing entirely for them, whether due to their mental health, psychological choice, life circumstances, or financial need?
Again, I cannot know without treating Clancy, but we know that she was a labor and delivery nurse. This invites speculation that cannot be answered here but could be considered in depth-oriented treatment. For example, returning to work might mean separating from her own children to care for other mothers and babies. It might mean she is surrounded by, and responsible for the care of, vulnerable mothers and babies while she was feeling so destructive towards herself as a mother and towards her own children and baby.
Women’s Fascination: Making the Shadow Speakable
When women who are engrossed in this case say, “I could have been Lindsay,” they may be consciously identifying with a vulnerability for experiencing postpartum illness, overwhelm, and a fear of impending collapse.
However, another, less conscious identification may be, “I recognize and fear Lindsay’s aggression in myself.” I am not talking here about masses of women identifying with murderous aggression, but rather, this case may be capturing such intense fascination because it has become a conduit for acknowledging ordinary, maternal aggression, which is still so taboo. I have routinely heard such feelings in over 30 years of clinical practice:
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“Sometimes I hate being a mother.”
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“My child’s personality annoys me—it is not a good fit for me.”
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“I resent how much my child needs me.”
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“I wish I had never had this child.”
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“My child is hard to love.”
Research backs this up. A 2024 study found that nearly 54 percent of mothers participating in the study had unwanted, intrusive thoughts of intentionally harming their babies.2 While they didn’t act on them as Lindsay Clancy did, they thought about it. Perhaps that’s why so many stories have emerged that express sympathy toward Clancy, expressing that other women may recognize themselves in her.
Of course, destructive fantasies are not equivalent to destructive action. While Clancy enacted an extreme that is not equivalent to the level of maternal aggression that I am talking about, the fascination may be related to how desperately women need permission to acknowledge that being a mother does not extinguish feelings of not liking their child some days, of feeling intense love and hatred for being so responsible, and more.
Clancy makes the unspeakable speakable and gives mothers vicarious permission to recognize the maternal shadow. The diagnosis performs a collective defense function and preserves the archetype of the wholly loving mother: “She didn’t do it; it was all about the mental illness.”
There’s much more to say about the Clancy case, and I’ll be discussing that in my next blog.
