Psychologically, mothers who have children born of rape have difficulty establishing a maternal bond with them for obvious reasons. And given that Jack is born as a result of Joy being kidnapped and repeatedly raped, I would think that it would be extremely difficult for someone in her position to develop loving and caring feelings for him. But we really don't see any signs of that in the movie. Did this seem a little unrealistic to anyone else?
No, because while the phenomenon you describe about maternal affiliation is an observed and verified one, it is not universal and a statement that mothers can't or don't bond with a child of rape is an over-generalization. A lot of data about this comes from post-WWII studies of women who were raped by enemy soldiers (Russians raping German girls, Germans raping Polish women....) and there are multiple outcomes.
Some women responded similarly to Joy, in that they regarded the child as the one good thing that came out of their traumatic experience. In Joy's case, she had no other human to bond with, so Jack fulfilled a real need. Consider that Jaycee Dugard and one of Ariel Castro's kidnap victims also bore children from rape and confinement, and those children were loved and nurtured by their mothers despite the circumstances. Jaycee even says in her memoir,
A Stolen Life, how thrilled she was by the birth of her first child (she was only 14), because there was finally someone for her to love and who was hers.
Joy is no outlier.
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