Changing Notions of the Feminine

Confronting Psychoanalysts' Prejudices

Margarita Cereijido

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429780981
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: changing notions of the feminine: confronting analysts’ prejudices
• 2. From the “Child Woman” to “Wonder Woman”: progress and misogyny in psychoanalytic theory and clinical work
• 3. Reflections on the evolving role of women as partners and mothers from the 1970s to the present
• 4. When pain takes hold of the dyad: trauma and compromise in the female psyche
• 5. Be careful what you wish for: a psychoanalyst reacts to the liberation of aggression in women
• 6. Motherhood and new reproductive techniques: an overview of the last 25 years
• 7. A psychoanalyst’s changing prejudices: understanding single mothers by choice in the 1980s and today
• 8. Femininity: transforming prejudices in society and in psychoanalytic thought
• 9. Voiceless heroines: deafened by theory?
• 10. “A case of homosexuality in a woman”, revisited
• 11. Gender and cultural sensitivity in practice: a consultation with a Moroccan family
• Index