One of the main tasks of the mother is to help the child become an independent person.
There is no specific moment in development when this must happen, since it should be a long, slow process that, from birth, unfolds harmoniously through all the stages of childhood and adolescence. It is a complex process because it often clashes with the desire not to separate that the mother carries within her. A desire that arises not only from the guilt felt by mothers who found it hard to accept their child (because they wanted to have an abortion or because they did not invest emotionally in him during pregnancy), but one that all women feel, even if with different intensity. To try to explain it, we must go back to what happens during pregnancy: at first the embryo is the object of the mother's physiological aggression, set in motion to defend herself against the invasion of a "foreign body"; however, if it is not expelled, this foreign body then comes to be regarded by the woman as a part of herself, until, with birth, it will be expelled.
From this perspective, the difficulty in separating from the newborn constitutes the reactive mechanism to the aggression at the start of pregnancy: the more intense their unconscious "uterine war" has been, the more the mother will tend to keep the child attached to her, unable to separate from him and to see him as an independent being. The indispensable, necessary identification/confusion that must form between the mother and the embryo/fetus during pregnancy thus conditions the separation. If, on the physical level, it is sealed by birth, by the cutting of the umbilical cord, on the psychological level it can happen only if the baby is recognized in his individuality, that is, as a being separate from the mother. Managing to separate and to recognize the child in his identity are the elements that characterize a healthy relationship of the mother toward her child: conversely, failing to separate and failing to recognize the child as other than herself reflects maternal possessiveness, lack of differentiation, confusion between the newborn and herself.
A course of psychotherapy undertaken to overcome difficulties tied to motherhood helps the woman put the relationship she has with her child into feedback with the one she experienced as a little girl with her own mother, and to realize, little by little, the repetition she is unknowingly living out. Just as she had once been a child "fused" with her own mother, that is, not recognized in her identity and her desires, now that she has become a mother in turn she identifies with her own mother and repeats the same behavior with her child. Recognizing the child thus becomes possible not only once the mourning for the loss of the child/part of herself has been worked through, but above all once the mourning for the separation from her own mother has been worked through. The more the mother has the chance to find and recognize herself in the repetition of her own childhood experiences and desires, the more she is able to move out of the state of non-separation from her child and to recognize him in his individuality.