A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Feminine
A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Feminine

Author: Houari Maïdi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-08

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1040093205

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A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Feminine sees Houari Maïdi dissect the concepts and characteristics of the feminine in both males and females, separating them from womanhood and femininity, and equipping readers with the tools to better understand pathologies such as masochism, narcissism, depression, and paranoia. Starting from Freud’s binary depiction of gender identity through the lens of bisexuality, Maïdi seeks to redress the way in which traditional psychoanalysis considers sexual characteristics. He separates the feminine from gender, showing how historically misogynistic theories in psychoanalysis have potentially damaged the progress of the field, as well as female and male analysands alike. Depictions of the feminine are considered through their relationship with traumatic seduction, mourning and melancholy to address questions related to different clinical and psychopathological representations. Using clinical vignettes throughout, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts and those interested in the intersection between gender and analysis.

Changing Notions of the Feminine
Changing Notions of the Feminine

Author: Margarita Cereijido

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0429780982

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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.

Femininity and Psychoanalysis
Femininity and Psychoanalysis

Author: Agnieszka Piotrowska

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-29

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1000008592

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For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes. This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger. Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensable tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.

Sexual Difference, Abjection and Liminal Spaces
Sexual Difference, Abjection and Liminal Spaces

Author: Bethany Morris

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-08

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9780367173340

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This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways in which sexual difference can be understood as an encounter with otherness through the abjected, investigating social discourses and unconscious anxieties around 'monstrous' women throughout history and how they may challenge these characterisations. The author expands on Barbara Creed's notion of the monstrous-feminine to give a specifically Lacanian analysis of different types of feminine monsters, such as Mary Toft, Andrea Yates, Lillith, and Medusa. Drawing on Lacan's theory of 'sexuation', the book interrogates characterizations of pregnant women during the Enlightenment, women who commit filicide, mothers in the psychoanalytic clinic, and women with Borderline Personality Disorder. Chapters explore how encounters with a feminine subject in the Lacanian sense can manifest in misogynistic practices aimed at women, as well as how a Deleuzian notion of becoming-other may pose a challenge to their interpretation in a phallocentric meaning-making system. Creatively engaging the work of both Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, the text goes beyond simply identifying misogynistic practices by probing the relational, unconscious dynamics between hegemonic groups and those designated as 'other'. Approaching the concept of the Borderline from a critical and transdisciplinary perspective, this text will appeal to postgraduate students and researchers from Lacanian psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies and critical psychology.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership

Author: Stephanie Brody

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-08

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1317551540

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2020 Gradiva Award Nominee, Best Edited Book 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.

Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory
Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory

Author: Nancy J. Chodorow

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1989-01-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780300173376

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Essays discuss the relations among gender, self, and society, the significance of women's mothering for gender personality and gender relations, and how the psychodynamics of gender create and sustain individualism

Female Sexuality
Female Sexuality

Author: Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel

Publisher: Cork University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780946439140

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Contains six essays and an introduction on Freudian and non-Freudian views of female sexuality. Contributors include Joyce McDougal, Maria Torok and Bela Grunberger.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity
Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Author: Alison Stone

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1136593519

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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.

Female Psychology
Female Psychology

Author: Eleanor Schuker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-23

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1000149072

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This book provides a psychoanalytic perspective on female psychology and includes articles with divergent theoretical viewpoints. It is useful for both research and clinical study and may also provide a bridge to scholars, teachers, and clinicians outside of psychoanalysis itself.

Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis
Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis

Author: Rosemary M Balsam

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-07-26

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1135137013

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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.