Mothers of Psychoanalysis


Book Description

"In lucid, uncluttered prose, Janet Sayers presents the reader with a fresh viewing of the lives and times of four extraordinary women pioneer analysts. Sayers recounts how they were able to shift the theoretic balance of the day to include the creative evolution of their thinking. This book is of value not only for the novice, but certainly for many others who can learn from these excellent, abridged biographies." --Dr. Helene DeRosis




Mother-Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis


Book Description

Winner of the 2004 Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. The issue of shame has become a central topic for many writers and therapists in recent years, but it is debatable how much real understanding of this powerful and pervasive emotion we have achieved. Mother-Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis argues that shame can develop during the first six months of life through an unreflected look in the mother's eyes, and that this shame is then internalised by the infant and reverberates through its later life. The author further expands on this concept of the look through a powerful and extensive study of the concept of the Evil Eye, an enduring universal belief that eyes have the power to inflict injury. Finally, she presents ways of healing shame within a clinical setting, and provides a fascinating analysis of the role of eye-contact in the therapeutic encounter. This book brings together a unique blend of theoretical interpretations of shame with clinical studies, and integrates major concepts from psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis, developmental psychology and anthropology. The result is a broad understanding of shame and a real understanding of why it may underlie a wide range of clinical disorders.




Mothers and Daughters II


Book Description

This is the second issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry devoted to mothers and daughters. This project began as the mother-daughter bond was calling out for attention in light of the many advances in our understanding of female psychology. The goal of female development is no longer considered to be a severing of the mother-daugher bond to attain autonomy and sexual maturity. What, then, are its vicissitudes as it is revisited, reworked, and transformed as the girl and her mother grow and develop and ultimately attain a state of interdependence? The relational context of development is now considered: gender-related differences in behavior and in parental interaction; and the girl's special relationship with her mother and her mother's body and the importance to her of her own body with its special attributes, contours, and sensations.




Mothering Psychoanalysis


Book Description

"In lucid, uncluttered prose, Janet Sayers presents the reader with a fresh viewing of the lives and times of four extraordinary women pioneer analysts. Sayers recounts how they were able to shift the theoretic balance of the day to include the creative evolution of their thinking. This book is of value not only for the novice, but certainly for many others who can learn from these excellent, abridged biographies." --Dr. Helene DeRosis




All the Mothers are One


Book Description

The book concludes with a brief reflection on mothering in contemporary America. Through a systematic critique of previous scholarship that has emphasized the individual and the universality of the Oedipus complex, All the Mothers Are One makes a significant, original, and ambitious contribution to the growing debate concerning the role of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of culture and in the study of childhood throughout the world.




Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity


Book Description

In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.




Psychoanalysis and Maternal Absence


Book Description

Experience of maternal absence manifests in a variety of ways and this book explores a selection of its emotional, psychical, and somatic consequences as they relate to an individual’s relationship with their body, psychic-emotional internal life, and intimate relationships. This book is not about mothers, but how individuals handle the trauma of mothers they have not had. Spanning backgrounds such as the collective child-rearing method of the kibbutz in Israel through to the possible difficulties of children who are parented by single parents, born out of sperm or egg donation, and adults who have suffered chronic sexual abuse, Shapira-Berman observes the precarious position of the analyst and the tension between the acts of witnessing and participating in client interventions. Espousing the values of authenticity and creativity, this text concludes with a reconfiguration of the roles of faith and trust within psychoanalysis and offers hope to those on their therapeutic journeys. This book will be a valuable resource for psychotherapists, as well as for various undergraduate and postgraduate studies in object relations, childhood trauma, sexual trauma and clinical therapy.




From Mastery to Analysis


Book Description




Mothers


Book Description

A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.