Prologue

Recent advances in our understanding of female psychology call for a rethinking of the mother-daughter relationship. This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry is the first of two in which we explore the vicissitudes of this bond. The goal of female development is no longer considered to be severing the tie to mother to attain separation, autonomy, and mature sexuality. Rather, the mother-daughter bond is to be revisited, reworked, and transformed. This idea is as revolutionary in its own right as was the overthrowing of the belief that awareness of anatomical sexual difference was the onset of female development.

We now recognize very early gender-determined behavioral differences and different ways in which parents interact with their boys and girls. We recognize the girl's special relationship to her mother's body and, also important, the girl's relation to her own body as female. Development is no longer considered purely linear and purely internally driven. Interactive, relational, and cultural aspects are appreciated. We no longer accept that the goal of psychological maturity for a woman is necessarily heterosexual procreation. The child's developmental conflicts and attendant traumata are not resolved definitively as she progresses through each psychosexual stage. Instead, conflicts are revisited and reworked throughout the biological life cycle and within a relational context. Our focus in this issue is on the revisiting and the reworking of the mother-daughter bond and on the forces affecting this process. We are on new terrain that is complex and interesting. There is much to consider.

Freud's only significant revision to his culture-bound vision of the “girl-starts-as-a-boy” theory—which essentially dominated psychoanalysis until the 1970s—was his recognition in 1931, 1933, and 1940 that the girl's mother has a prolonged role in her early development. But even with that revision, Freud emphasized only that this preoedipal bond is further proof of the tenacity of