ABSTRACT
Unlike Simon, whose detached divided self story of adolescence I have just told, women often talk of their attachment to others, particularly to their mothers and friends, through childhood and adolescence. Freud wrote elegiacally of the freedom from hate of the boy’s early love of his mother, and of her love of him. He claimed that ‘A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships’. Feminists have made much of women’s awareness of their closeness with others, in the first place with their mothers, as the source of what is now often referred to as women’s ‘emotional literacy’. Women’s complaints about their mothers’ response to their first menstruating, Dahl claims, are due to their mothers’ response inevitably falling short of the closeness they imagine having enjoyed with them as babies.
