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TODAY WE LOOK UPON the mother-daughter relationship sensing that we have new discoveries to make. There still seems to be something illusive about the issues of female development. At times we wonder if some of the problems of our women patients—their dependencies, depressions, inhibitions—are an assignment by the culture. But psychoanalysts are not content with such explanations.
I believe that there is something in the separation and identification process between mothers and daughters that makes the daughter's struggle for independence and sense of herself as a woman so difficult to achieve. While I have become impressed with a number of significant aspects of the mother-daughter relationship, in this paper, I would like to focus on what I believe is an essential factor in the successful emergence of the adult woman, namely, the establishment of a loving bond between mother and daughter.
In addition to their maternal, nurturing roles, one major task that mothers have, is to hand down a legacy of womanhood—to teach it, cultivate and nurture it, and especially to share it and be an example of it. This is the message from mother to daughter about what it is to be female.
A painful aspect of this task is for the mother to facilitate the separation process—to stand back and permit it to happen—in fact, to encourage it. Too often we overlook the pain involved for both mother and daughter as they struggle to become independent of each other. I am not referring to the anxiety activated by the separation process, but to the anticipation of loss and change, and the painful awareness of this by the dyad. Others have also described the mother's experience of loss. Deutsch (1944) noted that the mother often felt abandoned by her adolescent daughter. Sternscheim (1973), elaborating on Mahler and Pine's (1970) observation