Suchergebnisse

How do women experience the identity changes involved in becoming mothers for the first time? Throughout in depth case examples, Wendy Hollway demonstrates how a different research methodology, underpinned by a psychoanalytically informed epistemology, can transform our understanding of the early foundations of maternal identity.

How do women experience the identity changes involved in becoming mothers for the first time? When this is the question of an empirical research project, it poses methodological challenges: how can research bring to light such experience, and how can identity change be documented, conceptualised and written about? Nineteen women's lives populate this book, as they become mothers for the first time, each unique and all having much in common amidst the diversity of East London. Throughout in depth case examples, Wendy Hollway demonstrates how a different research methodology, underpinned by a psychoanalytically informed epistemology, can transform our understanding of the early foundations of maternal identity.

"In this book, the author addresses the assumption that the capacity to care is innate. She argues that key processes in the early development of babies and young children create the capability for individuals to care, with a focus on the role of intersubjective experience and parent-child relations. The Capacity to Care also explores the controversial belief that women are better at caring than men and questions whether this is likely to change with contemporary shifts in parenting and gender relations. Similarly, the sensitive domain of the quality of care and how to consider whether care has broken down are also debated, alongside a consideration of what constitutes a 'good enough' family." "The Capacity to Care provides a unique theorization of the nature of selfhood, drawing on developmental and object relations psychoanalysis, philosophical and feminist literatures. It will be of relevance to social scientists studying gender development, gender relations and the family as well as those interested in the ethics of care debate."--Jacket

The period of becoming a mother is a fundamental issue for feminism and a challenging one for psychology, involving a specific set of psychological processes and psychic changes that are hard to access through available language and discourses. How we understand, theorise and represent the perinatal period of mothering reaches into questions of gender equality and gender difference, parenting and how feminist psychology has tended to treat women's reproductive bodies and the biological. To explore these themes, the article draws on a piece of empirical research about becoming a mother for the first time, using matrixial theory to point beyond the binaries in feminist psychological accounts of women's reproductive capacities, parental care and gender equality.

Using data examples, I re-approach Donald Winnicott's idea of primary maternal preoccupation (1984[1956]) through Bracha Ettinger's matrixial concept of transsubjectivity. I argue that Winnicott recognises the radical difference between the mental state that women will have occupied formerly and the state that the prenatal and postnatal infant will claim, if the mother is available to it. With the benefit of a matrixial perspective it is possible to see how this description need not pathologise women, nor reproduce misogynistic discourses. On the contrary it begins to do justice to the enormity of women's transition as they become mothers: enormity because it threatens to pitch them beyond the experience of being a self-contained autonomous individual, a position which is normalised in what Ettinger calls phallic logic. Feminists risk reproducing phallic logic if we dismiss on ideological grounds, and thereby pathologise, this radically other state characteristic of the peri-natal period that many women experience when they become mothers.