Mothers and Daughters: The First Three Years

Author(s) : Ilene S. Lefcourt

Book Details

Publisher : Routledge
Published : December 2025
Cover : Paperback
Pages : 204
Category :
Forthcoming
Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis
Catalogue No : 98313
ISBN 13 : 9781041170396
ISBN 10 : 1041170394

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Mothers and Daughters: The First Three Years offers a new perspective on female development and the origins of mother-daughter relationship pleasures and stresses.

In addition to emotional development and the impact of mothers’ childhood memories on mother-daughter interactions, this book explores the enmeshment of personal and cultural themes about being female. Filled with mothers' intimate and surprising insights about the links between their own childhood memories and current interactions with their daughters that lead to solutions to typical mother-daughter conflicts, this book demonstrates the influence a little girl can have on her mother to discover new aspects of herself. In a changing world, where women are gaining more social, economic, and political power, this book illustrates how remnants of the past live on in the present.

Through the lens of female empowerment, mothers' memories are integrated with societal changes to shed new light on supporting the next generation of women.

Reviews & Endorsements
Table of Contents
About the Author(s)
Customer Reviews

Reviews and Endorsements

Ilene Lefcourt draws on over 35 years of a changing culture for women, while running parenting groups for mothers and their infants and toddlers. This is a wellspring of knowledge in the creation of optimal daughter-mother engagements that may help ”promote a little girl developing a strong, clear voice and becoming a woman who knows her own mind and expects her voice to be heard.” This book is an antidote to eons of female demure silence, fostered in the name of a “femininity” that is destructive to the ability of women to hold their own in a patriarchal society.
The text is lively and available, with informative, emotionally telling vignettes of pitfalls and successes. It shows how women help each other in the groups, fostered by the author. The growth and responsiveness of these (lucky) children, form the cherished centerpiece.
The book should be read by all mental health workers - not only child and family workers, but also therapists with mothers in their practices, and psychoanalysts, who hear sorrowful adult daughters rejecting being like my own mother. The more we learn from the observations of fine practitioners like Ms. Lefcourt, the more we can appreciate the psychic complexities and range of mother-daughter bonding and their surrounding networks of internalized family figures. No longer are female-to-female dynamics unworthy of such detailed study, as in the past. Little girls can be helped towards a sturdier psychic future.
Rosemary H. Balsam, M.D., Associate Clin. Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Medical School; Training and Supervising Analyst Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; author, Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis; ed, of two volumes on the work of Hans Loewald, 2024; The Sigourney Award for psychoanalytic excellence, 2018

Mothers and Daughters: The First Three Years is a treasure trove of wisdom that evokes childhood memories and leads to personal reflections that enrich the valuable information, and a deep attunement to a little girl’s developing mind. This book invites mothers to claim their own minds and voices at a time when a baby’s enormous needs can eclipse their own.
Drawing on 35 years of experience as the director of an early childhood center in New York City, Ilene Lefcourt generously shares her remarkable knowledge and her cogent understanding of the minds of mothers, babies, and toddlers in these crucial and formative early years of life. Ms. Lefcourt has a deep understanding of how intergenerational issues when not reflected upon can readily take up residence in the nursery. It is rare to read a book about early development that can have such a profound impact and be equally valuable to mothers and professionals.
Susan Coates Ph.D. Clinical Professor of Clinical Psychology, Columbia University Medical Center; Faculty, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

Introduction
1. Mother-Daughter Relationship Themes
2. Becoming a Mother
3. Mothers’ Childhood Memories
4. Moments of Intersubjectivity
5. Birth to One Year
6. One to Two Years
7. Two to Three Years
Epilogue

About the Author(s)

Ilene S. Lefcourt established the Sackler Lefcourt Center for Child Development in 1982. She was the director, led the mother-baby-toddler groups, and provided developmental consultation to parents for over 35 years. She taught child psychiatry residents and parent-infant psychotherapy trainees about her work. She has been a faculty member at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research Parent-Infant Program since 1995. Ms. Lefcourt is currently in private practice in NYC. She is the author of Parenting and Childhood Memories: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Reverberating Ghosts and Magic.

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