A typology of mother-daughter relationship patterns for young adult women and their mothers

Mothers and daughters: intertwining relationships and the lived experience of breast cancer

No relationship is more profound than the positional mother- daughter dyad. Each shares a physical, emotional, and spiritual link not experienced by others. The intrusion of breast cancer alters this normative dyadic relationship. In this article we explore this change through a hermeneutic reflective narrative inquiry, incorporating Bakhtinian dialogism, of the behavioral science literature, popular press, and other resources, and use of the motet to uncover the lived experience of women in this dyadic relationship.

Adult daughters and aging mothers: the role of guilt in the experience of caregiver burden

Although guilt is often identified as being a common emotion experienced by family caregivers in the clinical literature and in small descriptive studies, it has only recently emerged as a construct in the empirical research focused on identifying predictors of caregiver distress. Using Pearlin's stress process model, and based on data from 66 midlife adult daughters caring for aging mothers, we explored the extent to which guilt contributes to caregiver burden. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that guilt was positively correlated with burden and that it accounted for a significant amount of the variance in caregiver's sense of burden even after contextual and stressor variables were controlled. Our research suggests the importance of clinicians seeking to understand how individuals judge their caregiving performance and targeting negative self-appraisals, which affect individuals' mental health, for change. The challenge for clinicians is to help guilt-ridden caregivers revise their evaluative standards and engage in self-forgiveness and self-acceptance.

Intersecting race and gender in feminist theories of women's psychological development

Although self-in-relation theory is the predominant feminist position on women's psychological development in the nursing literature, other voices and views, particularly from feminists of color, have challenged the thinking about the psychology of women. This article explores the intersectionality of race and gender in feminist theories of women's psychological development and mental health. It begins with a brief review of psychoanalytic feminism, focusing primarily on the work of Chodorow and what is labeled "self-in-relation" theory as it has been applied in (primarily mental health) nursing. This is followed by a discussion of the perspectives of several feminists of color concerning women's psychological development, perspectives that both challenge and concur with the views of psychoanalytic feminists. The final section presents the implications of these various feminist perspectives (and their challenges to each other) for feminist work in mental health nursing.