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In this book, Dominique Guyomard once again explores issues relating both to the drive components that are specific to the maternal sphere and to the precise nature of the link between mother and daughter/mother and infant that precedes a true object relation. Dominique Guyomard had already touched on the nature of the drives involved in the maternal sphere in a chapter that she wrote for a book edited by Jacques André; in 2006 (Guyomard, 2006, in André, 2006).
The thread that runs through her present book goes from, on the one hand, the risk of mother and daughter being identical (hence the search for an otherness that is difficult to attain given this very sameness’) to, on the other, the necessary transmission from generation to generation of that feminine sphere insofar as it is a ‘civilizing’ mental process.
This is a very personal book, opening up many lines of enquiry that call for in-depth metapsychological thinking. It is not, however, an easy read. This is not in any way due to the fact that the author's references to Lacan's theory mean that the reader who is not conversant with that body of work will find them hard to follow, because Dominique Guyomard makes a point of explaining them as clearly as she can; the difficulty has more to do with her main hypothesis. She develops step by step the idea of the “drive specificity” of the maternal sphere as a “particular dimension through which the feminine component is handed down” (p. 11) and of a narcissizing link between mother and child. She calls this narcissistic modality a “link,” in order to distinguish it from any kind of “object-relation” (p. 118); its construction implies “the necessary existence of a narcissism that is ‘not object-oriented’, created by the mother-infant link, enveloping both mother and infant within that context, i.e. “the maternal sphere” (pp. 200-1). In Guyomard's view, the maternal sp