Abstract
The human struggle to separate and individuate from parents begins at birth. With birth comes the loss of psychophysiological symbiosis for both mother and child; with birth comes the beginning of bonding—the foundation of attachment and the beginning of what may be called “relationship.”
We knew, of course, that there had been a preliminary stage of attachment to the mother, but we did not know that it could be so rich in content and so long-lasting, and could leave behind so many opportunities for fixations and dispositions. During this time the girl’s father is only a troublesome rival; in some cases the attachment to her mother lasts beyond the fourth year of life. Almost everything that we find later in her relation to her father was already present in this earlier attachment and has been transferred subsequently on to her father. In short, we get an impression that we cannot understand women unless we appreciate this phase of their pre-Oedipus attachment to their mother.
—S. Freud, Female Sexuality (1931).
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© 1988 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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Offerman-Zuckerberg, J. (1988). Reflections on the Daughter as a Projective Screen. In: Offerman-Zuckerberg, J. (eds) Critical Psychophysical Passages in the Life of a Woman. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-5362-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-5362-1_4
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