ABSTRACT
This chapter is an account of the mother-daughter relationship outlining two case studies from the author's psychoanalytic practice. Drawing on recent writings on maternal subjectivity that critique the subject/object and autonomy/nurture split that have characterized thinking about the mother-child relation, her paper describes therapy encounters in which her own unconscious process led to interpretations that reinforced rather than challenged socially produced estrangements between mothers and daughters. Layton concludes with reflections on the effects of neoliberalism on mother-child relations and, in particular on the culturally specific estrangements that typically define White middle-class mothers and daughters in contemporary western societies.
