ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has based the idea of psychic development on achieving separation and individuation, and more specifically separation from the mother. The relationship with one’s mother is also often at the core of gaining insight into what has gone wrong and has led to symptoms of mental distress. The mother-daughter relationship in particular is considered within most psychoanalytic writing as fraught and complex, as it is on the basis of identification or disidentification with the mother that female identity is built. In this short story, Layla, one of the teenagers from Part I, is visiting a therapist in order to come to terms with her complicated relationship with her mother, which one could say is driven by unhealthy attachment and role reversal. What is being reconsidered here is the parameters of what a good enough life for an adult is, and how one is to deal with this most enduring of attachments, that with one’s own mother.
