Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis

Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Rosemary M Balsam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135137013
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Why has the female body been marginalised in psychoanalysis, with a focus on female problems and pains only? How can we begin to think about body pleasure, power, competition and aggression as normal in females? In Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis, Rosemary Balsam argues that re-tracing theoretical steps back to the biological body's attributes is fruitful in searching for the clues of our mental development. She shows that the female biological body, across female gender variants and sexual preferences, including the 'vanished pregnant body', has been largely overlooked in previous studies. It is how we weave these images of the body into our everyday lives that informs our gendered patterning. These details about being female free up gender studies in the postmodern era to think about the body's contribution to gender – rather than continuing the familiar postmodern trend to repudiate biology and perpetuate the divide between the physical and the mental. There are four main areas explored: • clinical contributions on female development • assessments of past and present psychoanalytic theories in relation to the body • inner portraits of gender building blocks • a conscious and unconscious focus on the potentially procreative female body. Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis will be of particular interest to psychodynamic, psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic practitioners, teachers, students, feminist academicians, college undergraduates, graduates and faculty in women's studies and gender studies. Rosemary Balsam is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine; Staff Psychiatrist, Yale University Student Mental Health and Counselling Services; Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.

A Woman's Unconscious Use of Her Body

A Woman's Unconscious Use of Her Body PDF Author: Dinora Pines
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136969187
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Drawing on Dinora Pines’ lifetime of clinical experience this classic book provides a psychoanalytic understanding of women’s relationships with their bodies, focusing on key moments in women’s lives. With chapters organised to follow the female life-cycle, topics covered include: the turbulence of adolescence pregnancy and childbirth infertility and abortion menopause and old age the traumatic effects of surviving the Holocaust. With a foreword from Susie Orbach, this book will be of interest to mental health professionals including counsellors, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts.

Changing Notions of the Feminine

Changing Notions of the Feminine PDF Author: Margarita Cereijido
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429780982
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
As culture changes, so do notions of the feminine. Today, women are exploring new gender identities, gender dynamics, and family configurations. They are questioning and redefining what it is to be feminine and expressing different attitudes toward motherhood. These issues have challenged classic psychoanalytic theory and practice. In this timely collection, a range of prominent psychoanalysts confront and explore their prejudices about changing notions of the feminine, and how it impacts their work. In a period of transition, these issues are present in the clinical material of female patients, and in the material of male patients who struggle in their complementary roles as partners and fathers. But how analysts listen and give meaning to clinical material is significantly affected by the analyst’s own prejudices, her implicit and explicit theories, as well as her subjective view of the world. Discussing topics such as the expression of power, the compatibility of assertiveness and ambition with the feminine, and the psychoanalytic impact of the spread of new reproductive techniques, this important and far-reaching book will be essential reading for any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist who wishes to engage actively with the sociocultural moment in which they work.

Volatile Bodies

Volatile Bodies PDF Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253208620
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
"Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is inherently social and has no pure or natural 'origin' outside culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is subject to the endless rewriting and inscription that constitute all sign systems. Grosz demonstrates that the theories of, among others, Freud and Lacan theorize a male body. She then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women--menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause--to lay the groundwork for new theories of sexed corporeality."--Back cover.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity PDF Author: Alison Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136593519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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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.

Femmes Fatales

Femmes Fatales PDF Author: Mary Ann Doane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136639047
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In this work of feminist film criticism, Mary Ann Doane examines questions of sexual difference and knowledge in cinematic, theoretical, and psychoanalytic discourses. "Femmes Fatales" examines Freud, the female spectator, the meaning of the close-up, and the nature of stardom. Doane's analyses of such figures as Pabst's Lulu and Rita Hayworth's Gilda trace the thematics and mechanics of maskes, masquerade, and veiling, with specific attention to the form and technology of the cinema. Working through and against the intellectual frameworks of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory, Doane interrogates cinematic and theoretical claims to truth about women which rely on judgements about vision and its stability or instability. Reflecting the shift in conceptual priorities within feminist film theory over the last decade, "Femmes Fatales" addresses debates over female spectatorhsip, essentialism and anti-essentialism, the tensions between psychoanalysis and history, and the relations between racial and sexual difference. Doane's nuanced and original readings of the "femme fatale" in cinema illustrate confrontations between feminism, film theory and psychoanalysis. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in women's studies, communications studies and film theory.

The Subject of Anthropology

The Subject of Anthropology PDF Author: Henrietta L. Moore
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745638171
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In this ambitious new book, Henrietta Moore draws on anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis to develop an original and provocative theory of gender and of how we become sexed beings. Arguing that the Oedipus complex is no longer the fulcrum of debate between anthropology and psychoanalysis, she demonstrates how recent theorizing on subjectivity, agency and culture has opened up new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality and symbolism. Using detailed ethnographic material from Africa and Melanesia to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a range of theories in anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis, Moore advocates an ethics of engagement based on a detailed understanding of the differences and similarities in the ways in which local communities and western scholars have imaginatively deployed the power of sexual difference. She demonstrates the importance of ethnographic listening, of focused attention to people’s imaginations, and of how this illuminates different facets of complex theoretical issues and human conundrums. Written not just for professional scholars and for students but for anyone with a serious interest in how gender and sexuality are conceptualized and experienced, this book is the most powerful and persuasive assessment to date of what anthropology has to contribute to these debates now and in the future.

Figuring Age

Figuring Age PDF Author: Kathleen Woodward
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253212368
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Figuring Age engages the virtually invisible subject of older women in western culture. Like other markers of social difference, age is given meaning by a culture. Yet unlike gender and race, the subjects of age and aging have received little sustained attention. Central to Figuring Age is the crucial question of how women are aged by culture. How are older women represented in a visual culture that is dominated by images of youth in television, film, and life performance? How do psychoanalysis, rejuvenation therapy and hormone replacement therapy, the fashion system, cosmetic surgery, and midlife bodybuilding shape our views of aging as well as of the older body itself? What is the "timing" of aging? To what extent is aging a culturally-induced trauma?

A History of Women's Bodies

A History of Women's Bodies PDF Author: Edward Shorter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140225181
Category : Accouchement - Histoire
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description


Thinking Through the Body

Thinking Through the Body PDF Author: Jane Gallop
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231066112
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
From one of our most outspoken feminist critics, this collection explores various ways in which the body can be rethought of as a site of knowledge rather than as a medium to move beyond or dominate. Moving between a theoretical and confessional stance, Gallop explores Sade's relation to mothers both in his novels and his life; Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text; Freud's work, read not as a psychological text but as a literary endeavor and from a woman's point of view; and Luce Irigarary's famous This Sex Which Is Not One.