ABSTRACT
This chapter will test further my hypothesis that the sexually procreative body (as opposed to either the sexual body or the procreative body treated as separate entities) is a centrally motivating element in the special interaction of mother to daughter and mother to son. Earlier, in Chapter 4, I showed how intensely a daughter will incorporate and internalize sensory, proprioceptive, and visual elements of her mother's pregnancies as building blocks for the future that become shaping to the internal concept of her own mature womanly body. Because of my focus on pregnancy, procreation, and sex there, a reader might argue that they were inevitably encoded together, and that my argument is hence tautological. The mother and daughter pairs discussed in the following text, however, are chosen to show that even when the topic is more general and more generally affectively charged—on whether love or hate is in the air, for example—there still are strong physical components present consciously and unconsciously, still relating to sex and procreation, in this bond between them as females. 1 Paying close attention to the physical elements of their stories helps shed light on how their emotional situations developed in the first place, and how they may evolve.
