ABSTRACT
The maternal inheritance referred to in the title of this chapter is that of mother to daughter. We live in a patrilineal culture in which a son’s link to his father and his paternal line is marked by the sharing of their name; a patriarchal culture which valorises the phallus and all that that symbolises, at the expense of the symbolic power and creative potential of the womb. If we are to take seriously the inequalities that still bedevil our society, then this is something that needs to be remedied. For as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray trenchantly puts it, ‘If we are not to be accomplices in the murder of the mother we also need to assert that there is a genealogy of women’ (Irigaray 1993: 19).
