ABSTRACT
The mother-daughter relationship has consistently been considered of major significance in understanding women’s development and especially in formulating women’s psychological problems. This focus on pathology is, unfortunately, still with us, and there has been little attention paid to the strengths or potential strengths emerging from this relationship. Even Freud, early on, acknowledged his lack of understanding of the preOedipal dynamics of this relationship, which he described as part of the ‘dark continent’ of female psychology. He did postulate that the girl’s pre-Oedipal stage of development persisted longer than the boy’s, and suggested that girls never really achieved a total shift away from the mother, due to problematic Oedipal resolution. Thus, the girl’s attachment to her mother was seen as regressive and infantile, and leading to psychological ‘immaturity’; masochism, passivity, narcissism and weak moral development. Such norms still underlie our clinical theory-valuing the separation of mothers and daughters. Freud essentially saw female Oedipal development as mirroring that of the boy, with this exception: the girl’s problematic task was to make an identification with her mother, who was anatomically deficient. Conflicts between mothers and daughters were viewed as rivalrous and Oedipally based, and healthy resolution was based on this problematic identification. Stiver (1986) has critiqued powerfully such a formulation of female development as reflecting a basic and profound misunderstanding of the mother-daughter connection.
