SOURCE: Wenzel, Hélène Vivienne. “Introduction to Luce Irigaray's ‘And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other.’” Signs 7, no. 1 (autumn 1981): 56-9.

In the following essay, Wenzel outlines Irigaray's feminist revision of psychoanalytic theories concerning the mother-daughter relationship in “And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other.”

When I speak of the relationship to the mother, I want to say that, in our patriarchal culture, the daughter may absolutely not determine her relationship to her mother. Nor the woman her relationship to maternity, unless it is to reduce herself to it.¹

With “And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other,” psychoanalyst and writer Luce Irigaray gives lyrical if anguished voice to the silenced daughter of the mother-daughter relationship.² In particular, she envisions a pre-Oedipal relationship between daughter and mother, a relationship heretofore only sketchily charted by psychoanalytic discourse and therefore virtually nonexistent. In fact Freud himself, as Irigaray...