Repetition of the Remembered Past: Patterns of Separation—Individuation in Two Generations of Mothers and Daughters

Interviews with 72 mothers and their young adult daughters provided a transgenerational view of daughters' separation from mothers in early adulthood. Young adult daughters of mothers who remembered their own mothers as enabling autonomy described interdependent mother–daughter relationships based on mutual support. In contrast, daughters whose mothers gave incoherent accounts of their own mother's efforts to constrain autonomy strivings were highly dependent on their mothers. Finally, daughters whose mothers coherently described their own mothers as constraining were stridently independent,

but their self-reliance appeared to be more defensive than proactive. The discussion considers how taking account of working models of separation-individuation, as conceptually distinct from models of attachment, may clarify issues in the therapeutic process, especially those associated with termination.