ABSTRACT
Ellman proposes that with female patients with profound pain, psychoanalytic understanding resides in how the pain takes hold of the analytic dyad. Her patients’ projections of their pain-filled maternal imago onto herself challenges her own self-perception. With her view of femininity as freeing and empowering, Ellman realized that many female patients’ body pain may express a cultural phenomenon related to gender and the daughter–mother dyad. It constitutes a form of feminine masochism transmitted by a “misogynous” maternal imago, which relates to the place women have historically occupied in society. The accomplished powerful female still struggles with painful maternal identification.
