Author: Alison Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136593519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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.
Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity
Author: Alison Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136593519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136593519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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.
Mother-Infant Attachment and Psychoanalysis
Author: Mary Y. Ayers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317762975
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317762975
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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.
The Reproduction of Mothering
Author: Nancy Chodorow
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520221559
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
This text had a major impact on both feminists and psychoanalysts when it was first published, and it continues to shape the thinking of analysts and feminists today.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520221559
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
This text had a major impact on both feminists and psychoanalysts when it was first published, and it continues to shape the thinking of analysts and feminists today.
Psychoanalysis and Maternal Absence
Author: Ofrit Shapira-Berman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000551695
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000551695
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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.
The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond
Author: Rosalind Mayo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138885042
Category : Mothers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
8 Motherhood and art practice: Expressing maternal experience in visual art -- 9 The paradox of the maternal -- 10 Not-so-great expectations: Motherhood and the clash of private and public worlds -- 11 Learning to be a mother -- 12 Music and the maternal -- 13 The maternal and the erotic: An exploration of the links between maternal and erotic subjectivity -- 14 How shall we tell each other of our mothers? -- Index
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138885042
Category : Mothers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
8 Motherhood and art practice: Expressing maternal experience in visual art -- 9 The paradox of the maternal -- 10 Not-so-great expectations: Motherhood and the clash of private and public worlds -- 11 Learning to be a mother -- 12 Music and the maternal -- 13 The maternal and the erotic: An exploration of the links between maternal and erotic subjectivity -- 14 How shall we tell each other of our mothers? -- Index
Remembering the Phallic Mother
Author: Marcia Ian
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801499418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
In a reinterpretation of the history of fetishism as a concept, Ian traces the significance of the trope of the "phallic mother" from early psychoanalytic discourse through Klein, Kristeva, and Lacan; across key works of modernist literature by Wilde, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Genet, and others; and in recent feminist theory, gender theory, and postmodern critical theory. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801499418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
In a reinterpretation of the history of fetishism as a concept, Ian traces the significance of the trope of the "phallic mother" from early psychoanalytic discourse through Klein, Kristeva, and Lacan; across key works of modernist literature by Wilde, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Genet, and others; and in recent feminist theory, gender theory, and postmodern critical theory. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
On Matricide
Author: Amber Jacobs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231512058
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231512058
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.
Mothering and Ambivalence
Author: Brid Featherstone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134771711
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
Children's rights, lone motherhood and the breakdown of families are all issues at the forefront of current social debate in the West, with little agreement on what constitutes good parenting, or how the needs of both mother and child are best met. The feminist contribution to this debate is particularly important in keeping in view the diverse identities of all those who provide mothering. The psychoanalytic contribution is often undervalued and misunderstood. Mothering and Ambivalence brings together authors from therapeutic, academic and social work backgrounds to discuss dependency, anxiety and gender relations within families. Drawing on extensive professional experience the contributors combine a psychoanalytic and feminist approach to mothering which transcends the polarized and simplistic political debate about women's and children's needs. They also show how such an approach can inform and improve professional practice.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134771711
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
Children's rights, lone motherhood and the breakdown of families are all issues at the forefront of current social debate in the West, with little agreement on what constitutes good parenting, or how the needs of both mother and child are best met. The feminist contribution to this debate is particularly important in keeping in view the diverse identities of all those who provide mothering. The psychoanalytic contribution is often undervalued and misunderstood. Mothering and Ambivalence brings together authors from therapeutic, academic and social work backgrounds to discuss dependency, anxiety and gender relations within families. Drawing on extensive professional experience the contributors combine a psychoanalytic and feminist approach to mothering which transcends the polarized and simplistic political debate about women's and children's needs. They also show how such an approach can inform and improve professional practice.
Are You My Mother?
Author: Alison Bechdel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547524366
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547524366
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem
The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Author: Elissa Marder
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082324055X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082324055X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.