ABSTRACT
As an adolescent I recoiled when told that I was like my mother; many years later I acknowledged some of our similarities with pride. That mothers’ and daughters’ shared anatomy and gender poses daughters with a unique developmental task is more than an anatomical truism. Almost all contemporary cultures conflate femininity and maternity and then idealise and denigrate both. Mothers bear and still primarily care for children, within a framework which, at present, is in a state of major transition. Within the traditional framework, sons are expected to disidentify with their primary love-object, their mother, in order to identify themselves with their fathers; daughters need to find a way of establishing themselves as people who have some kind of mastery (sic) over their environment, separate from mother, and yet identify with mother as a woman. Mothers inevitably internalise society’s ambivalence about maternity and this may particularly affect their mothering of daughters (women and motherstobe), both in early provision for the infant and in providing the environment within which the capacity to ‘play’, to be ‘creative’ and to become a person in her own right, will be formed. Psychoanalysis provides a way of thinking about the implications of these social transitions.
