Identity confusion, bisexuality, and flight from the mother

This paper deals with the effects of an oral-sadistic annihilating mother on her male and female offspring. The all-powerful nature of these mothers, and the corresponding helplessness of the fathers, produce in their offspring a sense of identity confusion, a struggle with their bisexuality, and a need to distance themselves from their mother. Everything unwanted in the mother is externalized onto and into the child, particularly suffering and pain, which are necessary for the maintenance of the (pathological) mother-child relationship. Positive movement (i.e., success) on the child's part threatens the balance of this relationship, is perceived by the child as a hostile and destructive triumph over the mother, and causes the Negative Therapeutic Reaction in therapy. The child's inherent masochism acts to preserve the early infantile omnipotence and leads to his/her assumption of all responsibility for the mother's affective states. The child's self-destructiveness also functions as a release for unconscious aggression toward the mother, due to the lack of boundary differentiation between the two.