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The psychoanalyst Hendrika C. Freud has put forth in her recent publication a powerful and perhaps paradigm-shifting argument regarding female development from the vantage point of the mother-daughter relationship. Her ideas are so convincing that we might wonder why we did not think of them ourselves, or we might ask what is it precisely about these ideas that has necessitated that they be kept at the edge of consciousness.
As a reviewer, I feel a keen need to convey to the potential reader that encountering this work may elicit the kind of nausea and vertigo that accompany finding oneself suddenly and unexpectedly exposed. For truth be told, in gazing upon the mother-daughter relationship we are entering the potentially dangerous domain of the mirroring merger, and at times claustrophobic realm that can feel, as it did at times to this reviewer, sickening. It produced longing for the familiar confusion felt when trying to understand over many years the rather bizarre ideas that constitute the female Oedipus complex. Yet it is well worth the working-through since this book, like a good interpretation, ultimately provides relief. It elaborates with grace and ease certain quite common dilemmas of feminine psyche and female soma, suggesting a framework for lay reader and clinician alike to rethink sources of and responses to female suffering. For certain, such a rethinking is long overdue.
It is fascinating to note that many psychoanalytic theorists concerned with things female are zeroing in on one question, albeit approaching it from many different perspectives—and that