A chronicle of mother-daughter envy

The Lost Daughter tells the story of Lada, a woman in her late forties, who embarks on a seemingly innocent vacation, in which she commits an act that shakes her inner and outer world. In the first few days of that vacation, Lada watches with great envy the close relationship of a little girl and her mother who spend time together on the beach. Her envy is related to Lada’s complex relationship not only with her two adult daughters, but also with motherhood in general. The little girl and her mother seem to her like the ideal of the primary symbiosis she never managed to create with her own daughters, nor with her own mother as a child, and therefore they evoke in her a wave of longing mixed with an unconscious phantasy of revenge, which she executes by stealing and hiding the little girl’s doll, watching the child’s distress, and the consequent deterioration of the little girl’s relationship with her mother. Chapter 13 deals with the love-hate relationship of mothers and daughters, and with the way in which the inevitable revival of ancient phantasies of incorporating and appropriating can trigger current mother-daughter relationships.