“Mother is Mother, Daughter is Daughter”
- A self-recovery guide for all mothers and daughters by a psychoanalytic expert
- How mothers can reclaim their lives as an independent women and human beings
Why do mothers turn more to their daughters than sons when feeling upset or distressed? Why do mothers look upon their happily married daughters with not just pride but a hint of jealousy? Why do daughters, when thinking about their mothers, feel gratitude as well as guilt and resentment?
We need to lose our mothers to find ourselves. And we need to find ourselves for our daughters to live their own lives. Woo-ran Park, a psychoanalytic expert who for more than ten years has conducted over 10,000 psychotherapy and dream interpretation sessions, reaches deep into psychology research and case studies to unlock the secret behind the love-hate relationship between mothers and daughters and explain how we can protect our girls from this emotional wounding across generations.
Many reasons lie behind the mother’s obsession with her daughter and the daughter’s inability to break free from this hold. But the author pays particular attention to the female tendency to attain self-realization by meeting the unmet needs of others. Mothers typically see the son or husband as the other and try to satisfy their needs, but when it comes to the daughter, who they see as their equivalent, they’re more likely to make demands. Likewise, daughters identify with the mother and see the mother’s emotions as her own. This is what makes the mother-daughter relationship so complicated: the daughter is angry at the mother who is full of demands but gives little love, and wants to hate her but can’t.
This deep psychological bond between the mother and daughter starts to show cracks as they become older, introducing problems, both big and small, into their lives. Feelings of obsession, bitterness, resentment, longing, and gratitude get rolled into one and make the two oscillate between love and hate. In short, the mother and daughter have failed to create a healthy distance between themselves.
Then what can we do? Park says we should question the social concept of unconditional motherly love and try to bring to surface the mom’s deeply-buried wants and desires as a woman. Only then can we forge a path different from our mother’s and our daughters live a different life from our young selves. The author walks us through the main conduits through which the mother’s unconscious is passed onto the daughter—emotions, gaze, unmet needs, maternal love, husband—and how we can reclaim ourselves as not just a woman but as a human being.
This book will help you to learn the Psychology for Mothers, Daughters and all of women, and recover yourself:
Feelings of Guilt, Resentment, and Gratitude - About Female Emotions
Daughters Grow up Feeding on Mother’s Emotions - About Mother’s Emotions
Am I Really My Child’s Mother? - About the Maternal Gaze
I Wanted to Be Mom’s Loving Daughter - About the Mother’s Unmet Needs
All Mothers are Strong? - About Maternal Love
Moms Be Moms, Dads Be Dads - About Our Husbands
Moms are Human Too - About the Mother’s Recovery
