Understanding the nature of the ties between a mother and her daughter is an essential step for the latter's future.

Maternal love is firmly anchored in our minds as practically sacrosanct. Yet some mothers indulge in forms of behaviour, either overprotective or too distant, that are hard to cope with and obstruct their daughters' autonomy. This situation can be verified when the daughters reach adulthood and encounter problems founding a couple and find that they feel generally dissatisfied — conditions that lead many of them to consult a therapist.

How does a mother's love play such a determining role in her daughter's life? What are the main features? Why must one be able to understand what is love — and what is not? What can a daughter do to stop striving for her mother's approval and instead think and live according to her own values?

By examining the phases of a woman's life when her mother's influence is strongest — childhood, adolescence, beginnings of sexuality, maternity — and the range of poisonous relations that can come into being at those times, the author proposes to help women, both daughters and mothers, understand a relationship that determines so much in their lives — so they can set themselves free and feel at liberty to be themselves.

Based on many stories of mothers and daughters, and written by an expert who is also a woman, this book offers the tools for women to understand and analyse their relationship with their mothers.



This book is aimed at daughters who have become mothers, so that they will not reproduce with their own daughters the situations that shaped them but that also sometimes shackled them.

Marie-Lion Julin, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, works in the medico-psychological centre of the Hospital of Neuilly-sur-Marne.