Bornstein - Mothers and Daughters

(2004).
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 24(5):601-628

Mothers and Daughters from Today's Psychoanalytic
Perspective
Paula P. Bernstein, Ph.D.
In this paper, I review and synthesize findings that may help us
remodel the way we think about the vicissitudes of the mother-
daughter relationship. Although exciting new ideas are
burgeoning in the literature, there seems to be a lag between
discoveries and their integration into clinical practice. Older
theories emphasizing separation and the girl's change of libidinal
object from mother to father reflect linear models that do not
encompass the development we observe and experience. Newer
theories depict development as interactive and relational
throughout the life cycleleading not to separation but to
autonomy with connectedness. Applying male models to the
female superego or speaking of the female Oedipus complex is
misleading. New myths are being proposed to describe the
conflicts integral to the girl's triangular situation. Applying the
myth of Persephone and Demeter has been especially instructive.
Many analysts tend to pathologize or infantilize the woman's
ongoing tie to her mother and tend to misunderstand the intense
ambivalence between daughter and mother. Once we recognize
that the course of development is not linear, we should expect to
see the woman revisiting, reexamining, and resynthesizing
representations of self-versus-mother and self-with-mother over
her lifetime.
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It has been 70 years since freud (1933; see also 1923, 1924, 1925, 1931)
published his last statements on female development and reiterated his
phallocentric views to explain the girl's change of libidinal object from
mother to father. About the same time, in concluding her ongoing debate with
Freud, Horney (1924, 1926, 1932, 1933) repositioned the girl's masculinity
complex within a broader framework emphasizing the girl's primary
femininity, her natural sexual attraction to her father, and her wish to become
a mother herself. Horney's ideas, along with similar ideas proposed by Jones
(1927), were relegated to the dustbin of Freud's disapproval, only to be
revived when inquiries into femininity burgeoned from the 1970s forward.
It seems safe to say that by now a revised view of female sexual
development is being incorporated into analytic work with women, however
falteringly (e.g., cf. Frenkel, 1996; Pelaccio, 1996; Basseches et al.,2000).
Contemporary psychoanalytic theories about female development were
crafted out of a synthesis of direct child observation and data from the
analytic consulting room. Over 30 years, the concept of primary femininity
slowly gained acceptance. We learned to listen to women from a vantage
point that takes into account the way the little girl really is made, her own
bodily sensations, her own ways of masturbating, her mental image of her
genitals, her sexual fantasies, and her specifically feminine genital anxieties
and conflicts (Clower, 1976; Lerner, 1976; Mayer, 1985; D. Bernstein, 1990;
Lax, 1994; Richards, 1996).
Generations of readers have paid less attention to the fact that, in his final
statements about femininity, Freud focused on the girl's tie to her mother,
which seemed to him problematic. It is striking that, despite widespread
interest in infant observational research and in the intersubjective and
relational aspects of analytic process, analysts have been slow to reevaluate
Freud's generally pessimistic observations of the mother-daughter
relationship. Analysts working with women today often express the same
puzzlement when they talk about the patient being enmeshed with her mother
and the problem they are having helping her to separate. My purpose in
writing this paper is to bring together some of the newer writings bearing on
the mother-daughter relationship per se so that we may better hear and
respond to women patients when they are talking about their mothers and
themselves. Although exciting new ideas are burgeoning in the literature, there
seems to be a lag between discoveries and their integration into clinical
practice.
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Rereading Freud's (1933) paper on femininity, I am struck by the acuity of
his direct observations of little girls. He saw girls as instinctually less
aggressive, defiant, and self-sufficient than boys and as more in need of
affection. Being more dependent and pliant, they were more easily toilet-
trained. Freud observed girls under five to be more intelligent and livelier
than boys their age and more socially attuned: They go out more to meet the
external world and at the same time form stronger object-cathexes (p. 117).
He perceived how strongly attached to and bound up with her mother the little
girl remained through all the stages of libidinal development. Her passions
were expressed in oral, anal-sadistic, and phallic wishes toward her mother.
Freud observed that the girl's first seducer was her mother, whose activities
over the child's bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even
roused for the first time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals (p. 120).
Freud (1933) distinguished between two phases of the girl's wish for a
babythe first an expression of identification with her mother's ministrations,
the second in relation to her father. He discerned two strata in the girl's
identification with her motherthe pre-Oedipus one which rests on her
affectionate attachment to her mother and takes her as a model, and the later
one from the Oedipus complex, which seeks to get rid of her mother and take
her place with her father (p. 134). He thought the earlier affectionate pre-
Oedipus attachment was the more decisive for acquiring the characteristics
that would equip her for her own future as a mother and as a woman who will
be attractive to a future husband (p. 134).
Freud discussed the girl's intense hostility toward her mother from a
perspective skewed by his conviction that the girl really was a little man in
these formative early years, as yet unacquainted with her vagina and
possessed of an inferior penis equivalent, the clitoris. On discovering the
anatomical difference, the girl held her mother responsible for her own lack
of a penis. Redirection of her libido from mother to father, the so-called
change of object, followed on her devaluation of her mother for being a
castrated person like herself and on her wish to obtain from her father the
baby as a substitute for a penis.
Freud saw in the woman's ongoing attachment to her mother a
developmental arrest (1931, p. 226) related to her failure to resolve the
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oedipal complexto smash it as the boy does (Freud, 1925). His views of
the supposed inferiority of the female superego are well known. Similar in
tone is his dismal view of the woman's potential for growth and change:
I cannot help mentioning an impression that we are constantly
receiving during analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us
as a youthful, somewhat informed individual, whom we expect to
make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up
to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often
frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her
libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of
exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further
development; it is as though the whole process had already run its
course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influenceas
though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had
exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. As therapists
we lament this state of things, even if we succeed in putting an end
to our patient's ailment by doing away with her neurotic conflict
[1933, pp. 134-135].
Obviously, most analysts of today cringe when confronted with this,
Freud's last word on female development. Less obvious, though, is the sticky
difficulty analysts have in replacing Freud's views with ones that more
accurately depict a woman's development. There are still some who give
great weight to the impact of the mother's lack of a penis on the girl's entry
into the Oedipus (cf. Hamon, 2000; in contrast to P. Bernstein, 2004). Many
more are conversant with the current literature on femininity but still
pathologize or infantilize the woman's ongoing tie to her mother. They do so
largely because, having learned to think about development in terms of
separation and individuation from mother, they tend to mistake the enduring
connection observed between mothers and daughters for a developmental
fixation. In the hope of shedding light on some areas of confusion for analytic
practice, I consider the nature of the early tie between mother and daughter;
the female superego; the female form of the Oedipus complex, and the lifelong
interactive development between mother and daughter.
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The Mother-Infant Bond: What we have Learned from Infant
Observation
The murky preoedipal period to which Freud turned his attention in the
1930s has been brightly illuminated by findings drawn from direct infant
observation. From the beginning, psychoanalytically informed researchers
studied infant-mother interactions, not just the baby (Winnicott, 1952; Spitz,
1959, 1965; Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975). Their research paradigms
sprang from and reinforced the psychoanalytic view of development as
intrinsically relational and unique for each individual. Their emphasis on
development, with its own inborn impetus, augmented the psychoanalytic
genetic perspective in ways important for treatment. The developmental
perspective postulates that the individual, from birth forward, actively
constructs her representational world of self and others, in interaction at first
with her primary caregivers and before long with her broadening world, in an
open-ended process that continues throughout the life cycle.
Over the past 20 years, observational studies of infancy and early
childhood have taken us in two interesting directions. The first is away from
the view that the infant's earliest mental life is symbiotic and toward the view
that the infant from birth forward continually elaborates ever more
sophisticated views of self as both distinct from other and related to other.
The second direction involves growing interest in the infant's construction of
a gendered self beginning the moment the infant's parents learn it's a boy or a
girl (P. Bernstein, 1997). Studies of the development of femininity and
masculinity and of the development of heterosexual and homosexual object
choice have greatly enriched our understanding of how and when
identifications with both parents are integrated with a person's gendered sense
of self. Our enriched views of normal development impel us to question our
tendency to consider the enduring nature of the mother-daughter bond as
pathologic in and of itself. More helpful to consider, in our therapeutic work
with women, are ways in which pathologic compromise formations may
contort the evolving, lifelong bond between daughter and mother.
Symbiosis Revisited
Freud (1930) assumed that for the infant the breast and the ego are one.
Only gradually does the infant learn about the reality of their
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distinctiveness (pp. 66-67). This view was taken up by the ego
psychologists, who postulated an undifferentiated state from which id and
ego differentiate hand in hand with representations of self and other
(Hartmann, Kris, and Lowenstein, 1946; Jacobson, 1964). Spitz (1955, 1965)
deduced from his direct observations of infants in the first year of life that
babies progress slowly from visceral to distance perception and from
preobject to object representationa view that underestimates the infant's
mental abilities as we understand them now. The Psychological Birth of the
Human Infant (Mahler et al., 1975), a landmark publication, provided
detailed observations of the child's separation-individuation from
symbiosis and of her conflicted longing to return to the grandeur of unity
with her mother during the first three years. Mahler's views and terms were
eagerly embraced, both by analysts who wanted to conduct analysis from a
more informed developmental perspective and by those who hoped to widen
the scope of analytic treatment to include patients with what we then
understood to be deficits due to problems in the line of development Mahler
had described.
Although some questioned Mahler's concept of symbiosis (Fraiberg,
personal communication, 1981; Brody, 1982), it was not until Stern published
The Interpersonal World of the Infant in 1985 that a different view of object
relations development was articulated for psychoanalysis. Stern argued that
the infant senses from birth the distinction between its own self and its
caregivers. Experiments with infants demonstrate that core self and core
other are not confused. Representations of self and other build continually,
along with a sense of self with other. Despite immediate interest in the
relevance of Stern's findings for relational theory (Benjamin, 1988), his ideas
have not been generally integrated into clinical practice.
Silverman's (2003) recent scan of articles included on the Psychoanalytic
Electronic Publishing (PEP) CD-ROM indicated that most analysts support a
concept of symbiosis. Her scholarly critique points to research findings that
demonstrate the infant's early active interest in the other, early communicative
behaviors, and active intentions from birth forward. Citing research on the
adaptive use of adult fantasies of oneness with another (e.g., mother, lover),
Silverman pointed out (as Stern did) that grasping the power and importance
of such symbiotic fantasies is distinctly different from positing a ubiquitous
early symbiotic phase. She emphasized that rethinking the concept
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of symbiosis is important because its acceptance affects our views about how
female development is conceptualized and then how psychoanalytic treatment
of women is conducted (p. 263). She argued that when an experience of
symbiosis exists between mother and infant it is a result of a maladaptive
attachment relationship (p. 263; see Main, 1993, 2000; Hesse and Main,
2000).
Silverman substantiated that most analysts are not aware of the many
independent research findings on which Stern's theory of the infant's
interpersonal world was based. The lingering notion of symbiosis, originally
derived from Mahler's work with psychotic children, seems to lend a
primitive and pathologic cast to the enduring bond observed between mother
and daughter. Stern's concepts are rarely mentioned in clinical case reports.
Stern called attention to a quantum leap observed, between seven and
nine months, when the infant discovers he or she has a mind and other people
have minds that are separate and can be compared. Mothers and babies direct
one another's attention by pointing, looking, and checking back to see if the
other is looking, too. The infant conveys intentions or requests with uh-uh
sounds and gestures. Mothers and babies mirror one another's affects quite
deliberately. The infant enters a wonderful new domain of intersubjective
relatedness that builds on the earlier sense of core relatedness. Up to this
time, the caregiver has served many self-regulating functions, but now the
baby becomes aware of the empathy between herself and her caregivers, the
bridge between her mind and the mind of the mother. A new awareness
emerges: you understand me (or you don't). Meanings are conveyed before the
infant learns to talk, in the affective signals exchanged between baby and
mother (Stern, 1985, chap. 6).
From Stern, it follows that negotiation of meaning with a highly invested
otherthe same process that powers analytic workbegins in the first year
of life and that this process is intrinsically interesting and enlivening. The
infant is constantly seeking guidance from her caregivers as she uses new
locomotor abilities to explore the world. Social referencing experiments
(Emde, 1983; Klinnert et al., 1983; Sorce et al., 1985) show how the infant
relies on affective signals from the mother to learn whether it is safe to
proceed in unfamiliar situations. The child manifests her own intentions
strongly: I can influence you. I can make you look. I can make you give me a
cookie! Or the converse: You don't understand. You won't let me. Already
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evident in the first year of life is the preverbal assertion of infant willfulness
against the powerful mother and the emergence of object-di-rected rage and
frustration (Winnicott, 1952, 1971; Spitz, 1953; Stechler and Halton, 1987;
Parens, 1991). As she struggles to control the situation, the infant learns
painfully what it is not safe to share. The ability to oppose mother's will
includes a developing capacity for sneakiness, secretiveness, and conflict.
Analysts who look to developmental research to understand manifestations
of maternal transference activated in the analysis are misled if they presume
that there is a universal, bedrock state of blissful symbiotic oneness to which
the person longs to return. It is more useful to recognize that the fundamental
closeness between mother and daughter is multidimensional, self-enhancing,
and contentious from the very beginning. The early tie includes primitive
somatic and affective intercommunications (Spitz, 1965) that are rapidly
elaborated into self, other, and self-with-other representations. It is out of the
reliance on mother for help with self-regulation and guidance that internal
object constancy (Mahler et al., 1975) is constructed. It is in this context that
fantasies of oneness with mother may be enjoyed or feared.
A deep ambivalence toward mother arises very early, based on the pitting
of an infant's will against that of someone with endless power to frustrate. It
might be more accurate to think of the infant not as dreading merger but as
fearing being overwhelmed by mother's power and dreading the painful
aggression aroused when the two are angry toward each other. The embattled
child seeks reconciliation, not union. From early on, she learns to negotiate
her wishes in the context of her mother's restraints and her guiding facilitation.
Current research suggests that the normal developmental thrust is not so much
toward the kind of separation from mother that Freud was expecting to see as
it is toward autonomy with connectedness (Emde and Buchsbaum, 1990). The
connected feeling is not regressive; it is essential to superego development
and to the feeling of mastery that supports autonomy.
The Female Superego
Emde and his coworkers (Emde, Johnson, and Easterbrooks, 1988; Emde
and Buchsbaum, 1990) found that infants between 18 and 36 months of age
already have internalized the roots of superego
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development, though impulse control may be best maintained under the
watchful eyes of the caregiver. Their studies demonstrate the preoedipal
child's empathy for others, prosocial behaviors and attitudes, and even the
capacity to struggle with moral dilemmas. Three-year-olds resist temptation
to evade mother's instructions (Didn't you hear my Mommy?), and they are
capable of pitting one value against another, such as whether to get a bandage
from the forbidden medicine chest if a playmate is bleeding and in need of
help. In a paper on the importance of talking with toddlers to help them
replace their own theories with a more sophisticated shared reality, Novick
(1986) described her work with Gina, a 15-month-old who thought her
earache was caused by her naughty behavior (i.e., it was her own fault). Gina
took the cautionary nursery rhyme about monkeys jumping on the bed
completely to heart. Countering Freud's view of female superego weakness
caused by failure to resolve the oedipal conflict as boys resolve it, research
shows that superego development is well along before the oedipal conflicts
take center stage.
The roots of morality arise out of baby-caregiver communications that are
interpersonal from the first. These everyday reciprocally negotiated
interactions help with internal self-regulation, guide behaviors, and promote
shared imaginative creativity (Emde, 1991). Although this process is not
gender-specific, observers have noted that girls tend to be more socially
attuned and more involved with their mothers. Olesker (1990) observed 9to
12-month-olds and found marked differences in the way mothers related to
girl versus boy babies. The different patterns seemed to be a function of
maternal responsiveness to differences in the way the babies behaved and
what they seemed to need: the mothers were taking their cues from their
infants. Girls were highly responsive to the social world (just as Freud
described) and more interested in the mother from the ninth month (when
Stern says the sharing of minds begins). They preferred to sit facing mother on
her lap, whereas boys strongly preferred facing outward and became ever
more attracted to the world of motion and toys. For girls, concern about
mother's love and approval seemed to take priority over exploration. They
shifted earlier into the rapprochement phase, with its increased anxiety,
negativism, and attempts to control mother.
It is important not to interpret these observations as confirmation of the
female developmental arrest Freud regretfully observed. Following Mahler, it
is common to see in the girl's rapprochement
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behavior wishes to merge again with mother in conflict with the urge to
separate, complicated by anger at mother for not having given her a penis.
Although fantasies of many sorts may give rise to anxiety in the toddler, the
battle is often over who is in control. P. Tyson (1994) pointed out that the
girl's distress reflects her struggle with her aggression toward motherfar
more painful than any reaction to the anatomical difference and arising for
many reasons. The conflict is one of love and hate toward a much needed
other.
Mother and daughter must negotiate all the disputes of toddlerhood, which
include battles around who controls Mommy's leaving, do it myself and in
my own time, toilet training, and so forth. The struggles with mother so
integral to self-versus-other and self-with-other development give rise to the
earliest superego imagos. The girl feels bad for hating the mother she also
loves and relies on. Although the awesome power of the archaic maternal
superego conjures up images of internalized prohibition, infant observations
underscore the importance of the do's and the positive emotions on
development of the child's capacities for self-regulation (Emde, 1991). P.
Tyson (1994) pointed out that, after primary femininity is established, the girl
looks to mother to admire, idealize, and emulate. By and large, the likeness
felt between mother and daughter furthers the girl's sense of competence and
enhances her self-esteem. For example, it has been widely observed that girls
are more easily toilet-trained than boys, and it is thought that sphincter
mastery contributes to the female body image (Richards, 1992).
The problems that ensue from the child's assertion of her own will and
mother's reactions toward her are felt as breaches that need to be repaired.
Stechler and Halton (1987) provided vivid vignettes of maternal reactions to
toddler self-assertions that inflame the child's aggression. Parens (1990,
1991) detailed what he termed two nodal conflicts of ambivalence (i.e., love
and hate) with which children contend starting at about 11 to 12 months of
age. The first conflict of ambivalence is experienced, in the preoedipal years,
out of the clash between the child's willful intentionality and her wish to
remain in harmony with her motherloved, guided, and protected by her. The
little girl struggles internally with her aggression toward her mother. Through
reaction formations, she tries to be good, clean, and neat, not hostile or even
sexual (P. Tyson, 1994). As Novick's (1986) work with Gina illustrates,
critical and perfectionistic introjects are internalized
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from a very early age. When the struggles with mother are consuming, the
ongoing ambivalent attachment skews the subsequent developmental tasks and
leaves the girl in a state of hostile dependency. When mother is hated, the girl
can hate her own femininity (P. Tyson, 1994). Parens's second conflict of
ambivalence, described later, is triadic.
Obviously, analysis explores the mother-daughter relationship unique to
each individual woman's life. When mother is severely conflicted,
narcissistic, abusive, or even psychotic, struggles with her can lead to a
whole range of outcomessome pathologic and some remarkably adaptive.
The common therapeutic goal of helping the woman to separate from her
mothereven a pathogenic motherneeds to be rethought, though, in ways
that integrate the idea that self-with-other issues are as ongoing as self-
versus-other issues in normal development. The work of the analysis consists
in exploring all the representations of self and of mother the patient carries
within her, however coloredfor example, as feelings of oneness (i.e.,
likeness, harmony) or of antagonism. Resolving internal conflict enhances the
girl's sense of her own individuality and her mother's. Commonly, as the work
progresses, compassion for both herself and for her mother deepens. Self-
with-other representations are constantly revisited and reworked in a process
that should be recognized as forward-looking and not regressiveleading to
a sense of autonomy with connectedness.
Current observational research lends support to views advocated by
feminist theoristsfor example, Miller (1976) and her colleagues at the
Wellesley Centers for Women and Chodorow (1978) and Gilligan (1982) at
Harvard University. These writers conceive female development as a
dynamic process of growth within the relationship or, as they term it, of
relationship differentiation (Jordan and Surrey, 1986). Thus, Gilligan
positioned her landmark study of female moral development in the context of
Chodorow's assertion that masculinity is defined through separation while
femininity is defined through attachment (Gilligan, 1982, p. 8). Although
Chodorow argued that the possibilities for full self-realization are
compromised precisely because women are raised by their mothers, Gilligan
saw woman's nature as her strength. Gilligan's research on the moral views of
Harvard students showed that woman's morality is not less than man's, as
Freud (1925) thought and even Kohlberg (Kohlberg and Kramer, 1969)
concluded. Rather it is based on quite different
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premises. Men develop a morality of individual rights defined by rules and
principles; women develop a morality of responsibility. A woman's moral
dilemmas involve balancing the demands of being responsible for herself, for
her family, and for the world in general.
D. Bernstein (1983) also argued that the woman's superego is no less
stringent than the man's and that only the contents of the superego are different.
She believed that the core problem for women is not castration anxiety but the
struggle to individuate from mother. I would reframe that thought to say that,
along with everything else, the girl's specifically feminine superego must
monitor an endless struggle with the ambivalence toward her mother that
resurfaces with every developmental stepreviving anxiety and guilt over
her own aggression and, always, the threat of loss. Most writers emphasize
the girl's fear of loss of mother's nurturance as she struggles with aggressive
feelings and fantasies. The woman's ongoing need for her mother's love is
augmented by her deep sense of being responsible to her maternal introject.
Her sense of responsibility is different from the boy's dread of castration.
Shame at falling short of her ego ideal torments her. Even secret hateful
thoughts make her feel bad and unworthy. As life continues, the relationship
often proceeds in the lived outer world with changing patterns of
connectedness. As the woman's mother ages, feelings of responsibility for her
mother impinge once more on her freedom.
It has been common to use the predominance of triadic versus dyadic
issues as a diagnostic marker. P. Tyson (1996) made clear that dyadic issues
are not the indicator of the level of pathology. To differentiate neurosis from
borderline disorders or psychosis, we must look to the patient's ego and
superego functioning. The capacity for self-responsibility and concern for
others is the hallmark of neurotic structure (see also Coen, 1991). Current
developmental research demonstrates that this capacity is laid down before
the oedipal period. The girl's sense of responsibility and her concern for her
mother figure importantly in the second conflict of ambivalence (Parens,
1990, 1991), the female triangular situation.
The Female Triangular Situation
As sexual feelings and fantasies develop alongside a growing awareness
of the parents' exclusive relationship with each other, the girl's ambivalence
toward her mother acquires new meanings (P. Tyson
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and R. Tyson, 1990; Parens, 1991).It is worth bearing in mind that the
relationship with father is not added, but reenvisioned, when sexual feelings
emerge. Several analysts have taken up the challenge of finding some other
myth that could dramatize the girl's so-called oedipal complex in terms that
better portray the woman's experience and help to expand the imagination.
The stories of Electra, Persephone and Demeter, and Athena and Medusa
have been proposed. Each provides a vehicle for talking about different
aspects of the mother-daughter relationship as the girl's sexuality develops
and her ambivalence intensifies.
What are we seeking in our new formulation of female triangulation? A
good story should take into account that the task of integrating sexuality and
aggression into a sense of womanly identity and personal efficacy begins with
early triangulation and extends well past menarche. In fact, sexual competition
with mother and conflicts over aggression play their parts in a lifelong
process of self-definition and redefinition. The sexual bodies of little girls do
not simply grow larger, paralleling the way the boy's penis grows bigger. The
girl's body changes form, as breasts appear and menarche makes real the
information mothers have imparted earlier about uterus and vagina. Balsam
(1996, 2003) pointed out that the girl must accommodate into her female
self-representation the potential waxing and waning of the mother's enormous
pregnant body. Myths that best describe female experience depict bodily
transformation (as beauty is bestowed or taken away), separation and loss,
and the girl's efforts to project her own aggression onto the mother and to
defensively disavow agency over her own sexual desires.
Freud (1931) was the first to point out that the Oedipus myth applied only
to the male child: It is only in the male child that we find the fateful
combination of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the other
as a rival (p. 229). Freud saw no gain in the using the term Electra complex
for the girl's situation (Freud, 1920, p. 155). Nevertheless, D. Bernstein
(1993) chose Sophocles's Electra to describe the girl's female oedipal
complex (1993; also Halberstadt-Freud, 1998). Electra persuades her
brother to murder their mother for taking a lover (while father was away
fighting in the Trojan War) and then murdering father on his return. D.
Bernstein observed that Electra's murder of her faithless mother is as much an
expression of the pain she feels because of her mother's profound disregard
for her
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as it is of her slavish devotion to a father who actually abandoned her no less
than her mother and the sister he sacrificed to the gods. D. Bernstein believed
that the most feared image of all is that of the competent, omnipotent mother of
infancy (p. 129). She emphasized the father's role in helping the girl
individuate from her mother and concluded, It is my impression that the
Electra myth describes a point in female development when the girl must
integrate her sexuality into her self-image, achieving a childhood identity
synthesis.In order to achieve this, satisfying relationships and
identifications with both parents are critical (p. 117).
In a seminal series of papers, Holtzman and Kulish used the myth of
Persephone to explore the female triangular situation and the integration of the
girl's sexuality and aggression into her identity (Holtzman and Kulish, 2000;
Kulish and Holtzman, 2003; see also Holtzman and Kulish, 1996, 1997). They
recounted the myth as follows:
Kore/Persephone, the young daughter of Demeter and Zeus, is
gathering flowers in a meadow with other young girls. As Kore
plucks a particularly beautiful narcissus that has attracted her, the
earth opens suddenly and she is abducted by Hades, God of the
Underworld and Death. Nobody hears her screams and cries.
(Some versions of the story make a rape more explicit.) When Kore
next appears, she is with Hades in the underworld. Hades is
pictured reclining on a bed with his shy spouse, strongly
reluctant.
Demeter, goddess of fertility and Persephone's mother, descends
from Olympus and frantically searches the earth for her daughter. In
her fury and pain, she causes famine and drought to spread over the
earth. Zeus is impelled by this catastrophe to persuade Hades to
release Persephone. However, Persephone has eaten some
pomegranate seeds. (In some versions she is tricked or forced by
Hades; in others, she takes the seeds willingly.) She has broken an
injunction not to eat in the underworld, and is now bound to Hades.
A compromise is worked out among the gods, by which Persephone
spends one third of the year with Hades and two thirds with her
mother. This compromise is the ancient explanation of the origin of
the seasons. Winter rules while Persephone is away from her
mother and living with Hades, and the earth flowers in spring and
summer while she is with her mother [Holtzman and Kulish, 2000,
p. 1415].
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One instantly appreciates how precisely the ancient myth describes the
triangular situation and entry into genital sexuality as it might be fantasized by
a girl. The tale is not like the oedipal myth, which conveys the boy's fantasies
of engagement in a deadly battle with father over sexual possession of mother.
Rather, it is a tale of divided loyalties, of closeness with mother disrupted by
a sexual drive that is disavowed by the innocent maiden, of the girl's
anxieties about the dark underworld of genital sexual love. The pomegranate
with its juicy red seeds evokes the womb and impregnation. The dark journey
to the realm of death suggests a fateful trajectory away from mother's care and
protection toward adult sexuality. I would add that the developing young
woman's assumption of her mother's place draws her not simply toward
penetration, pregnancy, and childbirth but beyond, toward motherhood,
menopause, old age, and death.
Holtzman and Kulish (1996) wrote that, for their women patients, loss of
virginity represents a passage or a transformation in life that is irrevocable
(p. 325). Feelings of loss and sadness resonate in the words never and
nevermore (p. 325). Themes of separation from mother typically accompany a
woman's remembered experiences of her loss of virginity, intertwined with
unconscious sexual fantasies about the father (Holtzman and Kulish, 1996,
1997). Women blame their mothers, on the one hand, for not protecting them
and, on the other hand, for keeping them ignorant of their genitals and their
capabilities. Women view their loss of purity and innocence as though through
the disapproving eyes of the internalized maternal superego.
Holtzman and Kulish (2000) emphasized that the concerns about
separation from mother that accompany a daughter's stepping into her world
as a heterosexual rival are not regressive, dyadic, or preoedipal, but are part
of the triangular experience and development itself (p. 1416). To
misdiagnose the level of the separation issues can produce a stalemated or
endlessly regressive treatment (p. 1433), because it colludes with the
woman's wish to hide her sexuality.
The girl needs to turn back to mother for permission, guidance, and
encouragement, yet becoming her mother is regarded with ambivalence.
Chodorow (1978) contrasted the boy's ongoing search for masculinity with
the girl's search for individuality. In her view, the girl is not trying to figure
out how to be feminine but how not to be her mother (p. 137). It is important
to bear in mind that identifications with father play an important role in
helping the girl forge her own
- 615 -
womanhood (P. Tyson and R. Tyson, 1990; Hanly, 1996; Yanof, 2000;
Balsam, 2001). (The father-daughter relationship is beyond the scope of this
paper.)
On Demeter's Anguish
Furman (1996), a child analyst who worked closely with mothers
throughout her career, and with mothers who had lost a child to death,
provides insight into Demeter's frantic state, which is an integral part of the
myth. The earth opens suddenly takes on additional meaning if read from the
mother's perspective. Furman wrote:
I have come to understand that the maternal body ego, and therefore
motherhood itself, is characterized by never fully delineating itself.
The female body ego is flexible, adapted to include a baby within
its boundaries not only during pregnancy in its inside space, but
also after birth when the child is physically outside the mother. This
so essential extension of the mother's body ego to her child (how
else could she care for him round the clock, often sacrificing
satisfaction of her own bodily needs?) does, however, need to be
renounced bit by bit and handed over to the child when he wants it
as his own. The life long processof being there to be left is,
however, the hardest and most threatening aspect of motherhood. It
never ends. It is repeated with each child [p. 439].
It can be as misleading to pathologize the mother's conscious and
unconscious identification with her own daughter as it is to infantilize the
girl's ongoing fears of separation and loss. It is widely understood that the
mother's experience of the girl as like her self affects their relationship from
birth forward. In the body of her infant daughter, a mother can see her own
past self; the body is known and familiar, one with which she can have total
identification (D. Bernstein, 1983, p. 191). Their common femaleness is
transmitted to the child in all the conscious and unconscious messages with
which she is bombarded from birth forward, from her immediate family and
the wider society in which they live (Stoller, 1968, 1976; Kleeman, 1976;P.
Tyson, 1982).
- 616 -
Themes of separation and loss cast a shadow over the most joyful times of
a woman's life. With each developmental step, the woman turns back, in
thought or in actuality, to her mother. This is true with marriage, pregnancy,
childbirth, menopause, aging, and death. The woman compares herself with
mother, often rivalrously, and often with enhanced empathy for her mother.
She identifies with mother even as she asserts differences that further
delineate her as her own woman (cf. Lax, 1982; Lester and Notman, 1986;
Pines, 1990; Bemesderfer, 1996; Raphael-Leff, 1996; Balsam, 2000;
Colarusso, 2000). In times of need, the fantasies of oneness with her mother
sustain her. For example, exiled to a facility for pregnant girls far from home,
a 15-year-old girl said, at the height of her anxiety about the impending
delivery, My mother and I have a big vagina. The ongoing dialectic of
separation and return is voiced poignantly by women who have attended their
mother's dying and watched the mother expire. The pain of irrevocable loss is
augmented by a terrifying sense of one's own mortality. One patient told me,
I heard a rattling sound in her throat, and then she died. It was so intimate. I
gazed at her and thought, So this is how I will die. And then, with the
intonation of a mother's voice instructing her from within, This is how you
menstruate, this is how you die.
The Disavowal of Sexuality and Aggression
Holtzman and Kulish viewed Persephone's travel between her husband and
her mother as a compromise formation that allows for a peaceable solution.
Closeness with mother is preserved, aggression is denied, and sexuality with
the powerful Hades (representing father) is secretly enjoyed, in the
underworld, out of mother's sight (Kulish,2002). Deutsch (1944) long ago
observed the importance of secrecy for the adolescent. Adulthood achieved
with the mother's help is not attractive, she wrote, and the mother's shyness
in speaking of sexual matters often meets the girl's unwillingness to listen (pp.
12, 156). Keeping or sharing secrets is a pleasure that delights girls and
women and can be richly enacted in the transference (Kulish, 2002). The
girl's defensive abdication of sexual agency and desire (Hoffman, 1996;
Kulish and Holtzman, 1998, p. 66) is buttressed by her terror of mother's
disapproval and the need to hide sexuality from her. Even
- 617 -
teenage girls growing up in today's extraordinarily sexually stimulating milieu
fear being seen as slutty if they own up to their own lust. Like Persephone,
they confide that sex suddenly just happened to them (Tolman, 2002).
Beneath the fear of disapproval for being dirty are the themes of deadly
rivalry with motherSnow White's confrontation with the dread Queen
Mother.
Seelig (2002) used the myth of the rape of Medusa in Athena's temple to
illustrate the girl's need to keep sexuality secret from mother and the terror of
confrontation with her imagined wrath. Most analysts are familiar with
Freud's use of Medusa to depict the horror of the female genitals in the eyes of
men. Few are aware that Medusa originally is a very beautiful young girl.
Like Persephone, she is raped by a father-figure god in the temple of Zeus's
daughter Athena. Athena punishes Medusa by transforming the girl's lovely
hair into revolting snakes (p. 898).
Athena, the virgin Goddess born from her father's brow, personifies the
girl who keeps the father by virtue of her exclusive identification with him
and her renunciation of other suitors.1 Seelig (2002) argued that Athena (who
remains pure) and Medusa (who fulfills her seductive wishes as an innocent
victim) both represent aspects of the girl's defenses against sexuality, with
Athena embodying the mother's vengeance as well. The theme of mother-
daughter competition is more blatantly set forth in the story of Arachne's
contest with Athena. Seelig wrote, As told by Ovid, the young Arachne was
very proud of her outstanding ability as a weaver and made the serious error
of challenging Athena to a weaving competition. Her skill was so great that
her product rivaled that of the goddess. As punishment, Athena turned
Arachne into a spider (p. 900).
It is noteworthy that in myths and fairy tales the maiden is the innocent
victim of a powerful goddess's wrath. Her aggression is not a motivating
force as it is for the male hero who goes forth to slay the foe. Rather, the
daughter's hateful fantasies spring to life in myths

1 Young-Bruehl's (1988, 1989) reflections on Anna Freud's attachment to
her father cast further light on the Athena theme in a girl's development.
Anna's identification with her father is evident in her extraordinarily
productive career. Young-Bruehl raised the interesting question of whether
it was Anna's underlying primary attachment to mother that led to Freud's
conclusions about the mother-daughter bond, as Anna's analysis was Freud's
deepest analysis of a female patient.
- 618 -
and fairy tales as deeds committed by the vengeful goddess, evil stepmother,
or witch. The daughter's own unrelenting wish for revenge springs from the
many insults associated with maternal authority and oedipal defeat. The
success of a woman's analysis hinges on analysis of her defenses against her
own aggression (Holtzman and Kulish,2003). On the other hand, the mother's
own ambivalence toward her daughter is a topic of growing interest (Mendell
and Turrini, 2003). Hoffman (2003) found in his work with mothers and
toddlers that many mothers experience intolerable conflicts over their hateful
feelings toward their children, the reverberations of which must be
experienced by the daughter. Dahl (1989) argued that the fantasy of the
fascinating and terrifying witch-mother so frequently associated with the
daughter's tenacious hostile attachment to her mother is better understood as
an oedipal fantasy configuration than as primarily preoedipal.
Carrying this line of thought further, P. Tyson (2003) argued against the
genetic fallacy of attributing all manifestations of female triangular conflicts
to early childhood. Love, hate, envy, and competition between mother and
daughter reach new heights of intensity as the girl reaches menarche and the
mother looks toward menopause(P. Tyson, 2003, p. 1125). At each milestone
in the girl's development, mother and daughter struggle anew with rivalry and
jealousy. The developmental issues integral to their life stages can be
understood as reciprocal and necessary for growth. Chodorow (2003),
writing of women patients who came for treatment when it was too late to
have children, described their destructive wishes toward mother's womb and
their own womb.
The Girl's Erotic Love for Her Mother
It is easy to understand the witch-mother as representing the terror the girl
feels because of her erotic wishes toward father. Dahl (1989) called attention
also to the erotic attraction to mother that is integral to the girl's developing
sexuality (see Young-Bruehl, 1989; Chodorow, 1990; Burch, 1996). The
girl's fantasies about the mother include
a secret excited longing for the mother and her body which the
daughter experiences as putting her at risk to be taken over by
- 619 -
the mother for the mother's pleasure; the projection onto the mother
of the envious, hostile, jealous, and possessive aspects of the
daughter's love; the experience of the mother as malignantly
destructive of the daughter's efforts to obtain genital pleasure from
other sources; and the oscillation between the wish to be the
mother's erotic partner and the fear that the mother would destroy
the daughter if she knew the daughter had an alternative erotic
object in the tie to the man [Dahl, 1989, pp. 267-268].
Like Holtzman and Kulish, Dahl reported the common use of silence and
secrets within the transference as sexual material is appearing (p. 279).
Dahl (1989) spoke of the bisexual hovering between erotic love for
mother and the secret erotic tie to the father (p. 277) that characterizes the
girl's early triangular situation and is then reworked in adolescence with the
best friend and the boyfriend (cf. Deutsch, 1944, chap. 3). It is common to
describe the developmental task as one of relinquishing the homoerotic tie to
mother in order to choose a heterosexual mate (see Blos, 1968). However,
this may be another one of those junctures in which separation from mother
may be painted in a misleading way. Freud must be credited for his
observation that the tie to mother must be erotic for children of both sexes, as
it was in intimate experience with the mother that sensual feelings were first
aroused. His effort, then, was to understand why the girl shifts her erotic
desires to father. Observing that the shift was only partial, he inferred that the
woman remains developmentally arrested. He assumed the girl's erotic
desires to be phallic, but the woman's homoerotic feelings are more complex
and less easily categorized.
Rather than drawing a distinction between a heterosexual and a
homosexual resolution of the girl's triangular situation and making this a
hallmark of feminine sexual differentiation and separation from mother, it may
be more helpful for understanding a woman's sexuality to think of her as
integrating the sensual memories of her mother's body into her own pleasure.
To render this more palpable, one might imagine taking into one's own
self-image the sensual soft breasts and belly of the mother so that one feels
like the subject and the object of sexual desire both at the same time. The
mother representations within become a component of sexual excitement.
Feeling in one's own body the ability to give pleasure and arouse desire
evokes the
- 620 -
dim memory of the cherished sensual softness of the mother's body and the
desires once felt toward her. Balsam (1996) wrote of the girl's fascination
with her mother's pregnant body and of the tendency for women endlessly to
compare all parts of their bodies.
In more recent papers, Dahl (1995, 2002) reminded us of the important
distinction between the girl's inner and outer mothers. Dahl explored the
role of the girl's intrapsychic relationships to her mother in mastering the
developmental milestones of puberty, menarche, active sexuality, and
psychological independence. The adolescent regressively longs for her
mother to help her regulate her inner excitement even as her developing
sexuality impels further differentiation of her own womanly body and feelings
of rivalry. Characteristic fantasies of adolescence and young adulthood can be
understood not only as representing an intrapsychic developmental
progression along object lines but as complex compromise formations that
have multiple defensive and adaptive functions (1995, pp. 190-191).
In process material provided by Dahl (1995), an adolescent patient toys
with temptations to drink and be sexually active. The patient externalizes her
excitement onto her fast friendsit is they who are wild. It is as though she
can walk away from the pressure of her own drives by avoiding her peers.
She calls forth the image of the intrusive controlling mother of infancy and
projects this onto the mother of current reality; then raging against her mother,
she surrenders to her control (p. 198). Dahl (2002) showed how
representations of the all-powerful limit-setting mother of the past may be
used in the constructions of adult analysands as their desires and conflicts
push for expression.
Conclusion
Underlying Freud's idea about the girl's incomplete change of object is a
linear theory of development, even though his theory of mind depicts
interacting dynamic systems that do not fit a linear model (Hartmann et al.,
1946; A. Freud, 1952). Once we recognize that development is nonlinear, we
do not expect to see the leaving behind of one phase for another but rather the
ongoing structural organization, transformation, and reorganization of
interrelated, simultaneously evolving psychic systems (P. Tyson, 1996). P.
Tyson
- 621 -
(1994) pointed out that, if we are to understand the way a woman experiences
herself, we must be open to hearing the interacting influences of sexuality,
aggression, object relations, and a superego that inherits the object-related
conflicts of early childhoodall intertwined with gender issues. Similarly,
the daughter's involvement with her inner and outer mothers is not regressive
in the pejorative sense. It reflects an ongoing process of revisiting,
reexamining, and resynthesizing self-versus-mother and self-with-mother
representations that are consistent with a more contemporary developmental
model. Dahl (1995) stated this current view very clearly:
The process of psychic integration of the tie to the mother as an
aspect of the self is never fully complete. The hallmark of adult
female psychic organization lies in the daughter's capacity to permit
continuing reverberations within herself of the representations of
the tie to the mother in her ongoing intrapsychic dialogue with her
mother [pp. 201-202; cf. Lasky, 2000].
Whereas Freud concluded from his observations that girls remain partially
fixated at a preoedipal level, current writers consider the complicated
enduring involvement with mother to be a feature of object relations for
women that is not in itself pathologic. The girl's anger, hostility, aggression,
or hatred toward her mother is not rooted in her lack of the phallus but stems
from many sources. The superego speaks in part in a maternal voice, entering
into conflict with the drives. Internal representations of the mother function
from infancy forward for purposes of self-soothing, affect and drive
regulation, and guidance. Out of these earliest experiences of interactive
regulation, the superego is built, refashioned, and elaborated throughout the
woman's life. Similarly, the external interactive functions of social
referencing, so easily observed in infancy, have their internal and external
counterparts in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Compromise
formations include reconciliation with the inner and outer mothers. These
inner and outer relationships have been imbued with ambivalence from the
infant's first willful altercations with motheran ambivalence fueled by
triadic conflicts. The inner mother may feel antagonistic at one moment and
facilitative the next, as new developmental experiences bring the need for
mother's help, on one hand, and new points of contention, on the other.
- 622 -
Once normal development is understood to proceed along self-versus-
other and self-with-other lines, issues with separateness and connectedness
are to be expected. Mother-daughter issues can be analyzed for whatever they
may be meaning at the momentwhether arising from self-assertion, or
conflicts about sexuality, or whatever. Feelings of love, hate, responsibility,
resentment, shame, guilt, likeness, difference, idealization, and denigration all
come into play.
Current findings from analytic work with women show that issues of
separation and loss are integral to the female triangular situation, not a
regression away from it, and certainly not a sign of developmental arrest. The
turn toward mother is experienced with each developmental milestone, from
menarche to dying. This is not to say that mother-daughter issues do not have a
part in the woman's neurosis or in pathology at whatever level. A central
aspect of analysis is exploring the representations of self and of mother the
patient carries within herself. The relationships to be discovered are unique
to each pair. Each woman's blend of mother and father identifications is her
own. Once therapists approach the work unhampered by the idea that their
task is to help the woman separatein the linear sense of the termthe
woman's endless struggles with her mother can be viewed as an avenue of
exploration leading to an ever richer understanding of herself, of her mother,
and of her internal conflicts. Issues with mother must be revisited again and
again, at each point in their interconnected life cycles, because it is in this
nonlinear manner that development goes forward.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Bernstein, P.P. (2004). Mothers and Daughters from Today's Psychoanalytic
Perspective. Psychoanal. Inq., 24(5):601-628

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Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 24(5):601-628

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