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In the course of analysis one often hears the fantasy expressed, “Ah, if I only had had a ‘real’ mother.” This “true” mother is, to be sure, a variant of the idealized mother, an image itself erected in counterpart to the dangerous mother derived from infantile instinctual projections. It is also a means for the patient to resolve her difficulties in detaching herself from a real, but disappointing mother.
De Bissy focuses on the difficulties that certain women experience in moving from the recognition of an external object to the acceptance of its loss by a successful internalization. This passage from external to internal object, if it is not carried out prior to analysis, cannot take place without the mediation of the analyst who is experienced concretely. The appeal to reality as a defense is certainly ambiguous, for the question remains open whether one is dealing with a real mother or an imago. We often see many children, when their mothers are in analysis, make spectacular improvements, and, inversely, one sees older mothers find themselves revitalized when their daughters go into analysis. The modifications of the imagoes are, as we well know, the sign of a good evolution of an analysis. Still, the reality must be taken into account, and it should neither be passed over nor be exclusively privileged.
It is at this point that the concept of primary homosexuality seems to provide useful enlightenment. This is probably a limiting concept, a scaffold that permits us artificially to clarify that which takes place between the female child and her mother. The sensual relationship of body to body between mother and child, with the experiences of the pleasure of identity, must have had a certain emotional quality, a certain duration, a certain plasticity, in order that its narcissistic aspect can subsist in spite of the parallel, enriching, but painful modifications deriving from the intrusion of the father. This is the time of “truth” between mother and daughter. It i