The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: 1tales of Women in Transformation

Drawing on accounts of mother-daughter conflicts that she heard about as a practicing psychoanalyst, Chernin (Reinventing Eve) provides a method for resolving the problems that can dominate this relationship in her perceptive and creative study. According to the author, many women are locked into a cycle of blaming and forgiving their mothers for any difficulties they have experienced. To transcend this pattern, Chernin recommends that a woman learn to ""give birth"" to her mother by changing the destructive dynamic that has existed between them through the healing power of storytelling. Telling and retelling the story of this relationship is supposed to take a woman through the seven stages of idealizing, revising, blaming, forgiving, identifying with, letting go of and finally giving birth to a new vision of her mother. Chernin recounts the compelling stories of several women for whom this process, she claims, has fostered self-development, including a woman who brought her mother home from a 30-year stay in a mental institution and another who extricated herself from a stifling mother-daughter relationship. Author tour. (Aug.)