Hatred in the mother-daughter dyad

Basic psychoanalytic concepts

Abstract

It is known that from the point of view of psychoanalysis, the maternal function plays a dominant role in the formation of the mental foundation and the development of the whole mental life of a person. However, as it seems to us, it is in the mother-daughter pair that maternal function acquires its peculiar features distinguishing mother-daughter dyad from other genealogical pairs. The reason for this lies not only in the single gender of mother and daughter, but also in the very physiological aspect of carrying and giving birth, unconscious projective and identity conflicts, narcissistic abuses by the mother, and the difficulties associated with the process of separating the daughter and her acquisition of her own identity. K. Eliacheff speaks of a daughter's «oppressed sense of self» (Eliacheff, 2008) simply because she has a mother, thereby bringing the identity issue to the fore, but immediately notes that not much attention is paid to this very issue even in the psychoanalytic space. Daughters are indeed in a more vulnerable position than sons in relation to both mother and father – despite the same sex the father-son dyad is initially divided by the mother's body, and only «the mother is the only one of the three sides of the Oedipus triangle who has a carnal connection with both the child's father and the child» (Green, 2007).

Speaking of the relevance of the topic of this article, it is also worth mentioning socio- cultural factors. In today's society, one can observe how a special form of intimacy between mother and daughter becomes the ideal of the mother-daughter relationship. «Mom is my best friend», «I have no secrets from my mother» – such words can often be heard from young women for whom closeness with their mother is an expression of their joint personal achievement, a point of pride. Joint shopping, vacations and photo shoots, often of an explicit nature, are not only normal but also possible, but the flip side of this mother-daughter intimacy is seemingly overlooked: the blurring of generational boundaries and the incestuous aspect of the relationship. Society pays a lot of attention to the incestuous relationship between father and daughter, as well as the rarer, but still present, cases of incest between mother and son, but almost no one talks about the incestuous relationship between mother and daughter. At the same time, it is this genetic couple that is more susceptible to «platonic incest» (Naury, 1999), a less obvious but probably no less pernicious form of incest between parent and child. The role of the third father, whose presence is necessary for an adequate mother-child relationship of either sex, also changes, but it is the mother- daughter pair that is more susceptible to identity confusion in the absence of a separating third. Moral and socio-cultural changes in society, the weakening of the institution of marriage, progress in reproductive technology lead to the fact that women often not only raise children alone, but also conceive them without having sexual relations at all (for example, through IVF). All of this gives rise to thoughts about maternal parthenogenetic fantasies and maternal omnipotence, which in the mother-daughter dyad acquires the most archaic and destructive forms.

Not every woman becomes a mother, but every woman has or had a mother. What kind of mother she was, and what kind of relationship she had with her, affects the whole future life and identity of a woman, exposing massive unconscious processes related to incestuous, identity-based, separational problems, which often complicate a woman's path to finding her own identity, motherhood, adult sexuality.

This article attempts to understand the mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of the above-mentioned conflicts in conjunction with the feelings of hatred that inevitably accompany them.