Prologue

This is the Second Issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry we have devoted to mothers and daughters. We began this project as the mother-daughter bond was calling out for attention in light of the many advances in our understanding of female psychology. The goal of female development is no longer considered to be a severing of the mother-daughter bond to attain autonomy and sexual maturity. What, then, are its vicissitudes as it is revisited, reworked, and transformed as the girl and her mother grow and develop and ultimately attain a state of interdependence?

We now consider the relational context of development; gender-related differences in behavior and in parental interaction; and the girl's special relationship with her mother and her mother's body and the importance to her of her own body with its special attributes, contours, and sensations.

This issue coming only a little more than a year after our first issue represents these highly experienced contemporary psychoanalytic authors' enthusiasm for contributing fresh data to this topic. Each writer illustrates how freeing and right it has been to establish that women's real-life experience turns out not to “overthrow” or psychologically need to repudiate the relationship to the mother in the radical fashion that used to be claimed was necessary to internalize and rework her own femaleness. As we said in the December 2004 issue, “For … [the girl] it is not the enduring maternal tie per se that is problematic, but rather the hampering conflicts that surround it that can diminish its effectiveness.”

When a shift of a traditional concept occurs that moves us closer to truth in the lives of women (as in the articles we presented previously), a responsive creativity is released in psychoanalysis. The current authors, by further clinical and theoretical demonstrations, integrate and consolidate the grounds for these dynamics and advance our field. Further understanding and deliberations overlap from the first issue, richen the