In this book, international psychoanalytic writers address the question ‘What do Women Want Today?’ from a variety of lenses, bringing into focus the creative, resilient forces shown by women in their multiple social and psychological tasks. The book reviews classic psychoanalytic theories about the feminine within a new cultural context. It challenges hegemonic gender prejudices and discusses new conceptions that do not pathologize ‘different’ lifestyles and family configurations. With chapters by leading, international thinkers in the field, this book explores how to think about new feminine scenarios, gender identities, gender dynamics, motherhood, and desire, in light of modern psychoanalytic theories. In presenting how these changing contemporary notions of the feminine challenge classic psychoanalytic theory and practice, this book will compel both training and experienced analysts to think about new psychoanalytic theories and engage with their own prejudices regarding changing notions of the feminine. Offering ideas relevant to psychoanalysis, sociology, gender studies, psychology, and activism, this book will be of great interest to professionals, teachers and students in addition to any with an interest in psychoanalytic theory and women’s studies.

Independent Women in British Psychoanalysis celebrates the lives and work of female psychoanalysts whose significant contributions to the Independent Tradition have hitherto been overshadowed by their male counterparts. The contributors in this volume look at seven female psychoanalysts who broke new ground with their contributions to theory and practice: Ella Freemen Sharpe, Marjorie Brierley, Paula Heimann, Marion Milner, Enid Balint, Nina Coltart and Pearl King. The chapters tell the individual stories of these psychoanalysts alongside their theories, showing how their personal lives embody and illustrate the essential universal developmental task of becoming oneself and finding one’s own voice. The themes across the chapters include infant and child development with (m)other, trauma, constructive use of aggression, creativity, a theory of clinical technique, and independence of mind in a social world. This book will be of interest and relevance to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, developmental psychologists, sociologists, group analysts and historians of psychoanalysis, as well as those interested in feminism and women’s position in society.

In this book, Patricia Alkolombre explores the desire for a child from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective, and covers the questions raised in the face of new resources offered by reproductive medicine. This volume reviews traditional psychoanalytic conceptualisations from the perspective of gender theories and analyses theoretical hegemonies related to the desire and passion for a child. Alkolombre discusses how the ‘passion to have a child’ is a key aspect of motherhood, characterised by emotional intensity, persistence, and self-sacrificial aspects. The book is divided into three sections: Part One deals with the desire and passion to have a child, while Part Two focuses on the impact of reproductive techniques, as well as the ever-changing role of parenthood in the modern day. Throughout these fascinating chapters, clinical vignettes of both individual and couple analyses span topics such as mourning, the use of reproductive technology, the anonymity of gamete donors, enigmatic infertility, surrogacy, and abortion from an interdisciplinary perspective. The historical and cultural contexts of infertility are reviewed from a psychoanalytic angle in Part Three with the view of transcending the former androcentric perspective that has deeply influenced the maternal ideal and expectations of men. Alkolombre also proposes a new analysis of the Oedipus myth. This book is vital reading for psychoanalysts, mental health professionals, teachers and students interested in contemporary parenting, motherhood, and infertility, as well as the theoretical analysis of the desire for a child.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership considers how these factors can be understood, nurtured, or thwarted and the subsequent impact on women’s identity, authority and satisfaction. Psychoanalysis has long struggled with its ideas about women, about who they are, how to work with them, and how to respect and encourage what women want. This book argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice must evolve to maintain its relevance in a volatile landscape. Each section of the book begins with a chapter that reviews contemporary ideas regarding women, as well as psychoanalytic history, gender bias, and societal norms and deficits. Three composite clinical stories allow our distinguished contributors to discuss the contexts within which individual experience can be affected, and the role that clinical work may have to mobilize and advance passion and vitality. In their discussions, the interplay of clinical psychoanalysis, sociopolitical context, and understanding of gender, combine to offer a unique perspective, built on decades of scholarship, personal experience, and clinical expertise. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership will serve as a reference for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars interested in the progress of psychoanalytic theory regarding women in the 21st century. Contributors to this book include: Rosemary Balsam, Brenda Bauer, Andrea Celenza, Diane Elise, Adrienne Harris, Dorothy Holmes, Nancy Kulish, Vivian Pendar, Dionne Powell, and Arlene Richards.

A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World: On the Body examines the importance of the body in everyday psychoanalytic practice and beyond. Written by world leading clinicians and international scholars, this important book aims to relocate the psychoanalytic body in the modern, more challenging world. Bringing together perspectives from across the range of psychoanalytic schools of thought, it covers essential analytic topics such as family and parenting, sex and gender, illness and psychosomatics, and concepts of the body in infancy. Though in Freud’s writing the intertwining of body and psyche is fundamental, psychoanalytic thought has sometimes downplayed or ignored this idea. This book returns the body to its rightful place in psychoanalysis, and brings the body into the contemporary world of technology and change, offering fresh insight into the sick body, the sexual body, the speaking body, the body of the changing family in which the traditional gendered labels no longer fit seamlessly, gender dynamics and much more. A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today's World gives renewed and increased emphasis to an essential tenant of psychoanalysis. With contributions from some of the most important modern psychoanalysts, this book will prove an essential work for both psychotherapists and academics.

The sexual revolution, oft discussed in the journalistic literature of recent years, has brought in its wake a host of questions that are only beginning to be addressed. How are women coping with "real world" challenges for which they may be ill prepared, both socially and psychologically? How successfully are they integrating old and new ego ideals in forging new identities? Is their ostensible "liberation" actually making for a sense of integration and wholeness? The Psychology of Today's Woman: New Psychoanalytic Visions probes these and related questions from the standpoint of both developmental and therapeutic concerns. Taking Freud's notion of female sexuality as a point of departure, editors Bernay and Cantor have compiled a collection of original essays that reassesses traditional conceptions of female psychology (Section I), proffers new visions of femininity (Section II), and explores critical situations in the lives of contemporary women (Section III). A final section of the book, of special interest to analysts and psychotherapists, examines the various facets of the clinical treatment of women. Collectively, the contributors to this volume articulate a strong challenge to the "deficiency model" of female identity that has long dominated psychoanalytic theory. More impressively still, they offer constructive alternatives to the preconceptions of the past. They converge in the belief that the richness and diversity of female experience cannot be encompassed in the overly simplified definitions and "masculine" analogizing of classical analysis. Whether we investigate the status of "masculinity" and "femininity" as personality traits, the relationship between "nurturance" and "aggression" in female identity, or the meaning of "normality" and "pathology" in treatment situations, we are very much in a realm of multiple truths in which the formulas of the past give little sense of the options of the present or the possibilities of the future.

In dialogue with the most famous myth for the origin of different languages – The Tower of Babel – A Psychoanalytic Exploration on Sameness and Otherness: Beyond Babel? provides a series of timely reflections on the themes of sameness and otherness from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. How are we dealing with communication and its difficulties, the confusion of tongues and loss of common ground within a European context today? Can we move beyond Babel? Confusion and feared loss of shared values and identity are a major part of the daily work of psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Bringing together an international range psychoanalytic practitioners and researchers, the book is divided into six parts and covers an array of resonant topics, including: language and translation; cultural identity; families and children; the cyber world; the psychotherapeutic process; and migration. Whereas the quest for unity, which underpins the myth of Babel, leads to mystification, simplification, and the exclusion of people or things, multilingual communities necessitate mutual understanding through dialogue. This book examines those factors that further or threaten communication, aiming not to reduce, but to gain complexity. It suggests that diversification enriches communication and that, by relating to others, we can create something new. As opposed to cultural and linguistic homogeneity, Babel is not only a metaphor for mangled communication, alienation, and distraction, it is also about the acceptance or rejection of differences between self and other. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists and researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds.