It had been an unexplored field – the profound change from womanhood to motherhood. This was what psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen decided to explore when she founded the group Mothers Talking. Society, she felt, tended to undervalue motherhood and its unique and nuanced language.
Stadlen, who has died aged 82, was revolutionary in describing what mothers actually did, instead of dispensing advice. She used her skills as a teacher and breastfeeding counsellor to help each mother develop her own unique role in forging a loving bond with her baby. But she found language itself was limited in its ability to describe it. So she wrote a series of bestselling books on family and motherhood, which she launched in 2004 with What Mothers Do – Especially When It Looks like Nothing.
The title came straight from her own reaction to a question posed to her in the late 1980s when her own children were still young.
“What do you do?” asked her husband’s colleague at a Freud Museum event. “Nothing”, she replied, disingenuously: “I just bring up our children.”
Later, it came to her how much she had undervalued her own work. As a result, her first book, published by Piatkus in 2004, was hailed as “the best parenting book you’ve never heard of” by Anne Karpf in The Guardian in 2005. Subsequent books also won praise from Dame Hilary Mantel, who described them as “full of simple and profound points.”
Stadlen claimed it was normal for new mothers to feel confused and disorientated. It was an invaluable part of the process by which a woman might come to know her baby as an individual.
Carefully nurtured familiarity could only come from the humbling uncertainty that enabled mother and baby to learn to listen to each other and develop real trust and understanding between each other.
Stadlen dismissed the absolute guidelines which were normally offered to new mothers by traditional books. These were often written, she claimed, by “so-called experts, many of them childless men.” he promoted the more gradual, learned experience of mothers themselves.
Her own experience had come from the antenatal yoga classes she had taken at the Active Birth Centre during her third pregnancy, which soon led her to become involved with weekly Mothers Talking groups in 1990. It would be a 35-year commitment that continued until shortly before she died.
Naomi Stadlen was born in London, the daughter of Berlin-born parents, who had both narrowly escaped the Nazis. Her mother, Marianne Jacoby née Goldschmidt, had worked with communist thinkers such as Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Wilhelm Reich, while her father, Hans Jacoby, a distinguished graphologist, died of a sudden heart attack in a London street in 1944, in the presence of Naomi, herself not yet three years old, who was left alone with him for at least two hours. Her brother, Ben was just two weeks old.
The suddenness of her father’s death traumatised the toddler and she spent several weeks afterwards with friends. It also left the family desperately short of money. Marianne subsequently also became a graphologist and worked as a Jungian analyst who practised almost up to the time of her death, aged 97.
Stadlen was educated at Town and Country School in London and the sixth form of North London Collegiate School. She later graduated with an MA in history from Sussex University and became the only member of the university’s first class of 50 students in 1961 to take its course on existentialism. The subject was of such interest to her that she answered an advertisement about existential teaching in The New Statesman.
The ad had been placed by the man who would become her husband, the future psychotherapist, researcher and teacher, Anthony Stadlen. They lived a few doors from each other and married in 1968. Their daughter, Rachel was born in 1971, followed by their sons, Shoël and Darrel, in 1978 and 1982.
In 1990 she trained as a psychoanalytic counsellor and began practising as an existential therapist mainly with mothers and couples.
Although Stadlen was not brought up with Judaism, over time she became drawn to Jewish philosophy and Torah study. She joined Belsize Square Synagogue in the 1990s, attracted by the fact it had been founded by the survivors of Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, of which her paternal grandfather had been the cantor, and which was destroyed during the November pogroms of 1938. Naomi became a key member of the congregation, giving sermons and reading from the Torah.
“It always seemed to me that she had a refugee mentality,” explained her daughter, Rachel. “She carried her passport and travellers’ cheques about with her, just in case she ever needed to escape at short notice, and I was given conspicuously non-Jewish middle names, in case I might ever need to disguise my Jewish roots.
“When we travelled in Germany and Austria in the 1980s, I remember my mother constantly assessing people’s ages and temperaments, wondering what roles they might have played in the war.”
At her funeral, Anthony Stadlen read a piece she had dictated to him shortly before she died.
“I was born in 1942 in London, in the middle of the war, and as soon as I was old enough to understand about the Shoah, I resolved to devote my life to goodness, in order to justify my own life, when so many were slaughtered.
“I finally found a way to do this, when I met Anthony and brought up our children, and realised that the power of a loving mother was much more important than generally acknowledged. I was shocked to find how despised motherhood was, and did everything I could to show women otherwise.”
Rachel reflected on her relationship with her mother; “Her insights into motherhood came from her own experiences. From the moment I began, she bathed me in her unconditional love. I was always a real person to her, with my own thoughts and ideas. She took me seriously and listened.
“When I was born, they told her to leave me alone to cry, scolded her for disobeying, and warned her that she was ‘making a rod for her own back’ by picking me up and comforting me instead.
“She instinctively felt that this was wrong. She recognised that a baby was already a real person, and that what mattered most about mothering was creating a loving, trusting relationship with that new person. And gradually she began to see the wider social implications: that only a baby whose first relationship was founded on love and trust was in the best position to become a secure and empathetic member of society.”
How Mothers Love – and How Relationships Are Born was published by Piatkus in 2011, and What Mothers Learn – Without Being Taught appeared in 2020. Why Grandmothers Matter was published by Pinter & Martin in 2023.
Diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer in 2022, Stadlen embarked on her final book, A Grand Quarrel: Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mothers Today, while undergoing the ravages of chemotherapy. She wondered whether she would live to see the book in print.
It was also a literary diversion from her earlier books, exploring an extraordinary dispute on the nature of motherhood between two titans of the 19th century: Gaskell and Nightingale. Stadlen summed up the relevance of their argument to today’s mothers.
Although Stadlen struggled at first to find a publisher, Martin Wagner of Montag & Martin (formerly Pinter & Martin) was so excited by it that he brought the publication date forward and raced to her home, where she was spending her final days with her husband and daughter, to deliver advance copies.
“She was by then hardly able to open her eyes or communicate,” said Rachel, “but she managed to look at a copy of A Grand Quarrel and acknowledge with a single nod, that she’d seen it. Then, just seconds later – having fulfilled her final ambition – she died.”
She is survived by her husband, Anthony, her children, Rachel, Shoël and Darrel and grandchildren, Tovi Wen, Anya and Antoshka.
Naomi Stadlen: born November 25, 1942. Died June 6, 2025
