ABSTRACT
As Irigaray suggests, within the mother-daughter relationship there is only one position—the mother’s position. The girl attempts to control the relationship to a bad mother with daily obsessional rituals. The mirror hints at the processes of projective identification, which perhaps plays a greater role in the mother-daughter relationship than in any other. The father-son love is based on identification, and is precisely the kind of love which the girl may be denied. Electra represents only one type of a mother-daughter relationship, that which is based on a denial of maternal identification. Identification with a damaged or dead mother, which precludes the possibility of making reparation, would be fatal not only to ego-structure, but also for the development of femininity and the capacity to bear children. One way in which the girl works through her ambivalence and repairs her damaged objects, is by working-through the damaged relationship with mother in her relationship with her father.
