ABSTRACT
In ‘Female Sexuality’ Sigmund Freud himself made the observation that his model of gender identity, because it is based upon the Oedipus complex, is more applicable to masculine than to feminine development. He commented that the girl’s pre-Oedipal relationship to mother is at least as important as her Oedipal relationship to father. Melanie Klein describes the girl’s early relationship to mother in terms of an infantile phantasy-world which consists of both love and hate, plenitude and frustration, bliss and terror, envy and gratitude, satisfaction and cannibalism. The father provides a temporary refuge for the girl, a base from which she can work through her ambivalence, envy and hate towards her mother. The mother-daughter relationship has formed the focus of many contemporary attempts to describe and explain feminine development, mainly from a feminist perspective. Julia Kristeva awards less importance to the mother-daughter relationship, and more to the necessity of the child—male or female—to separate from mother.
