Page 22 Raine • Strained Differentiation and consequential conduct. Hunt thus displays the extent of maternal identification through the thread of unevaluated advice that Ash subscribes to, exemplifying the lack of distinction between maternal and filial values in their undifferentiated relationship. Grief Response to Maternal Loss Unconscious Desires for Connectivity in Dreams For a daughter caught in maternal identification, the death of a mother often incites an unsatisfiable, unconscious desire for continued maternal intimacy that may pervade even the daughter’s dreams. Critical theorist Lois Tyson notes that “death is the ultimate abandonment,” and that grief responses will differ depending on an individual’s “psychological makeup,” thus tying the psychological socialization of individuals to their grief intensity and coping skills (22). As such, daughters socialized to depend upon and mutually identify with their mothers often struggle more intensely with maternal death because after a lifetime of maternal connectedness and guidance, sudden autonomy is a “discovery… accompanied by panic, for the [daughter] is still dependent on the mother” (Flax, Mother-Daughter Relationships 10, 8). This longing for continued connectivity can seep into the daughter’s unconscious, which “is the storehouse of…painful experiences and emotions…[that] we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them” (Tyson 12). For maternally identifying and grieving women, the “haunting, idealized mother of infancy,” perceived through a sort of “fantasy union” where the two are interconnected and interdependent, overtakes a large part of the unconscious (33-34). As the grieving daughter is burdened by an unsatisfiable longing for her deceased mother’s psyche to remain attached to and invested in her own, her unconscious longing may grow more pervasive, working its way into her dreams (Flax, The Conflict 180; Tyson 18). Though the conscious mind may subdue the daughter’s pain while she is awake, such defenses cease during sleep, thus allowing the unconscious “to express itself…dreams,” with recurring dreams as “the most reliable indicators of [her] unconscious concerns” (Tyson 18, 21). Psychotherapist and critical theorist Jane Flax addresses this type of filial grief through “the [typical] female psychodynamics the dream encapsulates,” which stress a disjointedness “between mother and daughter” (Mother-Daughter Relationships 11). Essentially, these dreams showcase the grieving and codependent daughter’s unconscious and unprocessed bereavement, making known during sleep the pain that would otherwise remain hidden in the unconscious. Ash’s Troubling Dreams Hunt’s novel depicts the struggle for such grieving, maternally attached daughters to cope. It highlights Ash’s unconscious desire for maternal intimacy specifically through her troubling dreams. More unnerving than a natural death, Ash’s mother’s suicide ushered unprecedented trauma and premeditated abandonment into Ash’s life, heightening her feelings of grief and desertion. The effects of the suicide resultingly pervade Ash’s psyche
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