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Nini Herman's latest work is a masterful investigation of the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship as it unfolds dynamically from birth to death. It is an examination of this most compelling of all relationships, although one generally ignored in the psychoanalytic literature. Herman's study, however, goes beyond the confines of intrapsychic exploration. It is scholarship at its most serious and comprehensive. It provides the reader with a truly interdisciplinary understanding of its subject matter. Too Long a Child: The Mother-Daughter Dyad is an attempt to resolve the ahistoricity of the female experience through a connectedness that reaches beyond metaphor. In a very real sense it is a soul-searching journey, inspired, the author tells us, by personal needs, yet motivated and played out against a tapestry of mythology, sociology, culture, and, of course, psychoanalysis, particularly Kleinian theory.
Herman scrupulously explores the female psyche once labeled “the dark continent” by Freud. Dark, perhaps, because Freud could not truly penetrate it. The often quoted phrase Was will das Weib? reflects his frustration at being unable to find parallel explanations for the oedipal relationship in boys and in girls and in later male/female development. Women, so it was believed, could be understood only in relation to men or, more specifically, to the male anatomy, the penis. Men have it; women lack it and need to possess it. It is precisely this “awareness” that something is missing that profoundly and indelibly colors the female psyche.
Yet psychoanalysis is not the only perpetrator of gender distortion. History has abetted this duplicity by contributing the faulty, incomplete, and therefore fallacious views of