Fortunately, there are happy and secure mothers who manage to communicate to their lucky offspring that satisfying mother is not the number-one priority in life. Some others, however, don't give that message, and it's the face of that mother that has launched a thousand diatribes. As all the newer psychoanalytic theories emphasize--contrary to Freud's vision of development--every child's safety and security is rooted in the feeling of being loved by a contented woman who tells her children that their ways of loving her and being angry at her are acceptable. To keep this woman we get in life's first lottery contented and happy, all of us, as children, will willingly sacrifice our personal desires, feelings, thoughts, and actions. But then we emerge into adolescence and adulthood unable to set a clear and satisfying course for our own lives.
How can we emancipate ourselves from mother and grow up? We have to come to understand that if something makes us happy and mother unhappy, good and bad do not have to be perversely redefined for us. "Good" is supposed to be that inner sense that tells us, "This is me, this is right for me, this satisfies me." Now, given mother's unhappiness, we have a powerful reason to relabel all of this as "bad." To achieve true grown-up status, we must struggle against the worst outcome of this conflict, which is: "What makes me happy is bad." If we can reach the point where we can say: "What makes me happy is good for me and good for me only and I cannot be responsible for her happiness," then we are well on our way to growing up.
