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Analysis of a number of young girls and women has led me to the increasingly firm convinction that it is impossible to attach too much importance to mother fixation in women.
Note, first, how passionate and uncompromising is the craving of little children for their mother's love, without which they can no more thrive than without food. When experience teaches them that that love can be forfeited, that at times they are deprived of it in favour of someone else and even that the 'good' mother may turn into the 'bad' mother, they will do their utmost to avert these dangers.
The impression I have derived from observation is that, although the normal Oedipus complex could undoubtedly be demonstrated in my female patients, it was renounced owing to the dread of losing the mother's love, the infantile object receiving regressively a libidinal cathexis, the intensity of which was the greater in proportion as a greater mass of libido had been mobilized in the heterosexual object-choice. The woman's infantile, narcissistic fixation to her mother has a decisive effect on the whole of her subsequent life, only a small portion of libido, apparently, remaining available for heterosexual ties.
As the child develops, the dread of losing her mother's love turns into dread of the infantile super-ego, which represents the introjection of the mother who forbids and punishes. The nucleus of the super-ego in women