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Bauduin reviews several cases of mother-daughter relationships which involved the concept of dominance or mastery (emprise). This term, as used by French psychoanalysts, refers to a fundamental tendency toward the neutralization of the desire of another person, that is, “to the elimination of all difference, otherness, the abolition of all specificity.” The relationship of mastery can set itself up within any duality, including parent and child, but is especially frequent between mother and daughter.
Mastery is imposed first by the mother and is subsequently maintained by the daughter's submission. Mastery operates through seduction and eroticism; it results in the construction of an illusory world between mother and daughter. The daughter's role consists in never dethroning the mother, and of maintaining intact the mother's fantasied omnipotence through her own childish omnipotence on loan to the mother. The mother, for her part, needs the omnipotence of the child to confirm the newly rediscovered childhood omnipotence of her own. There is a sort of play of narcissistic mirrors, sustained by the fantasy that each is the erotic possession of the other, and can and must suffer for the pleasure of the other, in an affirmation of an illusory symmetry.
This relationship is not to be construed as an oedipal configuration. Rather, if the child supposes she once upon a time satisfied the mother, merely seeking this satisfaction again in behavior with another person, whether by defiance, vengeance, or nostalgia, is sufficient to produce guilt. Every transfer of feelings to another object, masculine or feminine, constitutes a betrayal with respect to the mother, the primary object to whom she owes everything. The task of treatment is to bring to light this contractual link between mother and daughter, in which the daughter is not to find pleasure in anyone but the mother.
Maternal seduction expresses itself through means of caretaking and toilet needs. The most intense means of