When a mother-daughter relationship is crazy

special relationship

Someone idealizes his mother, and someone admits that he hates her and cannot find a common language with her. Why is this such a special relationship, why do they hurt us so much and cause such different reactions?

A mother is not just an important character in a child’s life. According to psychoanalysis, almost the entire human psyche is formed in the early relationship with the mother. They are not comparable to any others.

The mother for the child, according to psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, is actually the environment in which it is formed. And when relationships do not develop in the way that would be useful for this child, his development is distorted.

In practice, the relationship with the mother determines everything in a person’s life. This places a great responsibility on a woman, because a mother never becomes a person for her adult child with whom he can build equal trusting relationships. The mother remains an incomparable figure in his life with nothing and no one.

What does a healthy mother-daughter relationship look like?

These are relationships in which adult women can communicate and negotiate with each other, live a separate life — each of her own. They can be angry with each other and disagree with something, dissatisfied, but at the same time, aggression does not destroy love and respect, and no one takes away their children and grandchildren from anyone.

But the mother-daughter relationship is the most complex of the four possible combinations (father-son, father-daughter, mother-son, and mother-daughter). The fact is that the mother for the daughter is the primary object of affection. But then, at the age of 3–5, she needs to transfer her libidinal feelings to her father, and she begins to fantasize: “When I grow up, I will marry my father.”

This is the same Oedipus complex that Freud discovered, and it is strange that no one before him did this, because the attraction of the child to the parent of the opposite sex was noticeable at all times.

And it is very difficult for a girl to go through this mandatory stage of development. After all, when you start to love dad, mom becomes a rival, and both of you somehow need to share dad’s love. It is very difficult for a girl to compete with her mother, who is still loved and important to her. And the mother, in turn, is often jealous of her husband for her daughter.

But this is only one line. There is also a second one. For a little girl, her mother is an object of affection, but then she needs to identify with her mother in order to grow and become a woman.

There is some contradiction here: the girl has to simultaneously love her mother, fight with her for the attention of her father, and identify with her. And here a new difficulty arises. The fact is that mother and daughter are very similar, and it is very easy for them to identify with each other. It is easy for a girl to mix her own and her mother’s, and it is easy for a mother to see her continuation in her daughter.

Many women are really bad at distinguishing themselves from their daughters. It’s like psychosis. If you ask them directly, they will object and say that they distinguish everything perfectly and do everything for the good of their daughters. But at some deep level, this boundary is blurred.

Is taking care of your daughter the same as taking care of yourself?

Through her daughter, the mother wants to realize what she has not realized in life. Or something that she herself loves very much. She sincerely believes that her daughter should love what she loves, that she will like to do what she herself does. Moreover, the mother simply does not distinguish between her own and her needs, desires, feelings.

Do you know jokes like «put on a hat, I’m cold»? She really feels for her daughter. I remember an interview with artist Yuri Kuklachev, who was asked: “How did you raise your children?” He says: “And this is the same as with cats.

A cat cannot be taught any tricks. I can only notice what she is inclined to, what she likes. One is jumping, the other is playing with a ball. And I develop this tendency. The same with children. I just looked at what they are, what they naturally come out with. And then I developed them in this direction.

This is the reasonable approach when a child is viewed as a separate being with its own personal characteristics.

And how many mothers do we know who seem to take care: they take their children to circles, exhibitions, concerts of classical music, because, according to their deep feeling, this is exactly what the child needs. And then they also blackmail them with phrases like: “I put my whole life on you,” which cause an enormous feeling of guilt in adult children. Again, this looks like psychosis.

In essence, psychosis is the indistinguishability between what is happening inside you and what is outside. The mother is outside the daughter. And the daughter is outside of her. But when a mother believes that her daughter likes what she likes, she begins to lose this boundary between the inner and outer world. And the same thing happens to my daughter.

They are the same sex, they really are very similar. This is where the theme of shared insanity comes in, a kind of mutual psychosis that only extends to their relationship. If you do not observe them together, you may not notice any violations at all. Their interaction with other people will be quite normal. Although some distortions are possible. For example, this daughter has with women of the maternal type — with bosses, female teachers.

What is the cause of such psychosis?

Here it is necessary to recall the figure of the father. One of his functions in the family is to stand between mother and daughter at some point. This is how a triangle appears, in which there is a relationship between the daughter and the mother, and the daughter with the father, and the mother with the father.

But very often the mother tries to arrange so that the communication of the daughter with the father goes through her. The triangle collapses.

I have met families where this model is reproduced for several generations: there are only mothers and daughters, and the fathers are removed, or they are divorced, or they never existed, or they are alcoholics and have no weight in the family. Who in this case will destroy their closeness and merging? Who will help them separate and look somewhere else but at each other and «mirror» their madness?

By the way, do you know that in almost all cases of Alzheimer’s or some other types of senile dementia, mothers call their daughters «moms»? In fact, in such a symbiotic relationship, there is no distinction between who is related to whom. Everything merges.

Is a daughter supposed to be a «daddy»?

Do you know what people say? In order for the child to be happy, the girl must be like her father, and the boy must be like her mother. And there is a saying that fathers always want sons, but love more than daughters. This folk wisdom fully corresponds to the psychic relations prepared by nature. I think that it is especially difficult for a girl who grows up as a «mother’s daughter» to separate from her mother.

The girl grows up, enters the childbearing age and finds herself, as it were, in the field of adult women, thereby pushing her mother into the field of old women. This is not necessarily happening at the moment, but the essence of the change is that. And many mothers, without realizing it, experience it very painfully. Which, by the way, is reflected in folk tales about an evil stepmother and a young stepdaughter.

Indeed, it is difficult to endure that a girl, a daughter, is blooming, and you are getting old. A teenage daughter has her own tasks: she needs to separate from her parents. In theory, the libido that awakens in her after a latent period of 12–13 years should be turned from the family outward, to her peers. And the child during this period should leave the family.

If a girl’s bond with her mother is very close, it is difficult for her to break free. And she remains a «home girl», which is perceived as a good sign: a calm, obedient child has grown up. In order to separate, to overcome attraction in such a situation of merger, the girl must have a lot of protest and aggression, which is perceived as rebellion and depravity.

It is impossible to realize everything, but if the mother understands these features and nuances of the relationship, it will be easier for them. I was once asked such a radical question: “Is a daughter obliged to love her mother?” In fact, a daughter cannot help but love her mother. But in close relationships there is always love and aggression, and in the mother-daughter relationship of this love there is a sea and a sea of ​​aggression. The only question is what will win — love or hate?

Always want to believe that love. We all know such families where everyone treats each other with respect, everyone sees in the other a person, an individual, and at the same time feels how dear and close he is.