The mother-daughter relationship is intricately bound, in our psyches as well as in the living. The paper addresses the daughter’s challenge of coming into her own subjectivity while identifying and empathizing with the mother, when the mother is often the one who perpetuates the inherent violence on women, the attacks on their subjectivity, in a patriarchal culture. The daughter’s question of who she can be is complicated by her conscious and unconscious identification with the mother as both perpetrator and victim of oppression. The paper seeks to engage with this dilemma through a case illustration and explores how we could come to hold these different parts of ourselves.