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The conceptualization of female homosexuality helps to account for the vicissitudes of the attachment between mother and daughter. Godfrind stresses the importance in treatment of following the oscillations between primary homosexuality
and secondary homosexuality. The progressive detachment of the latter, by freeing up the potential for identification with the genital mother, allows the fuller development of a feminity that can be expressed in autonomy, creativity, and involvement with heterosexuality and maternity. The author describes certain patients in whom there is an intense conflict over homosexuality attributed to the core of primary homosexuality in the relationship with the mother, but having profound consequences for secondary homosexuality and for the feminine aspects of the patient. In these cases there is a troubled early relationship with the mother resulting in perturbations in feminine narcissism. All are women who had experienced a very traumatic childhood not only in terms of events but also in terms of their relations with their parents. Their histories contain brutal separations, deaths, incest, rape, family secrets, and rejections. These patients describe mothers who were incapable of giving the love that is indispensable for the organization of narcissism on a solid basis; the mothers were immature, depressed, unpredictable, capricious, irresponsible, or openly psychotic. In analysis one encounters at first the intense hatred these patients have for their mothers. Behind this fierce hatred, however, there is always a hopeless love for the mother. The hatred masks the patients' fears of subjugation or psychic disintegration. It is surprising that such patients are able to remain in analysis, especially with a female analyst. There is, however, a subterranean current of idealized transference, and with the separations involved in analysis the analyst becomes, suddenly and abruptly, the target for fantasies of intense, terror-stricken violence