DIALOGUE

Len Cruz Ph.D.

"The mother - daughter relationship is one of the most vital of all human relationships, resolving itself into the relationship each woman has not only to her mother, but also to her own feminine psyche. The mother, or the mother image, is at least a determining factor, if not the determining factor, in a woman's relationship to herself as a woman - and particularly to her instinctive side. This inner attitude is reflected me a relationship both to her mother and in turn to her daughter. But most important is the inner relationship - the relationship between the mother and daughter within her."

(Excerpted from "The Mother-Daughter Relationship" byMary Briner. Mother Father, Chiron Publications, 1990.)

The Asheville Jung Center is offering a free chapter from the book Mother Father (Chiron Publications, 1990) as a belated Mother's Day gift.  This extraordinary collection of essays edited by Henry A. Wilmer (Understandable Jung, Practical Jung) boasts contributors that include Robert Bly, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Mary Catherine Bateson, Jerome Kagan, and Murray Stein.

Mary Briner proposes that the mother-daughter relationship determines a woman's relationship to herself and three factors are involved.  There is a feminine structure with which a woman is born.  Secondly, there is a cultural and historical pattern into which every woman is born.  Finally, the mother-daughter relationship, "colors, or even distorts,..." the first two factors...