I have to tell you about an idea I've read this week which has blown my mind. Traditionally in developmental psychology, the infant is thought to experience a profound, formative experience of loss, which takes place during weaning & represents the end of attachment to the mother

It marks the beginning of the child’s socialisation as an autonomous individual. This is everywhere in psychoanalysis – it’s a foundational argument.

But relational psychologists suggest that actually this is very gendered. They suggest that it’s *boys* who are encouraged to detach from the mother and re-form themselves as autonomous. But *girls* are socialised to be…social.

They’re allowed to continue identifying with the mother, and they’re not socialised as autonomous individuals. But girls *do* experience a formative period of loss. This doesn’t take place during infancy (as trad psychotherapy argues), but during ADOLESCENCE.

The loss is not the loss of the mother but the loss of girls’ own selves, of their voices, belief in their own reality (the knowledge they form through their bodies). Girls are encouraged to deny their selves & their reality, in the name of maintaining relationships with men.

Girls are encouraged to be in relationships in which they lose themselves. This idea makes so much more sense to me than the traditional narrative of loss during weaning. It’s so INTERESTING. It’s really my mind

Anyway, everyone should read Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, by Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, because it's incredible

And Silencing the Self: Women and Depression, by Dana Jack!