Changing Notions Of The Feminine

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.

In this book, prominent psychoanalysts discuss their prejudices about changing notions of the feminine and how it impacts their work.

The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold.

When Betty Friedan produced The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she could not have realized how the discovery and debate of her contemporaries' general malaise would shake up society. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the pretty image of the magazines, and found themselves forced to seek meaning in their lives only through a family and a home. Friedan's controversial book about these women - and every woman - would ultimately set Second Wave feminism in motion and begin the battle for equality. This groundbreaking and life-changing work remains just as powerful, important and true as it was forty-five years ago, and is essential reading both as a historical document and as a study of women living in a man's world. 'One of the most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century.' New York Times 'Feminism ...... began with the work of a single person: Friedan.' Nicholas Lemann With a new Introduction by Lionel Shriver

Translated by CAROLYN SHREAD In the post-feminist age the fact that ‘woman' finds herself deprived of her ‘essence' only confirms, paradoxically, a very ancient state of affairs: ‘woman' has never been able to define herself in any other way than in terms of the violence done to her. Violence alone confers her being - whether it is domestic and social violence or theoretical violence. The critique of ‘essentialism' (i.e. there is no specifically feminine essence) proposed by both gender theory and deconstruction is just one more twist in the ontological negation of the feminine. Contrary to all expectations, however, this ever more radical hollowing out of woman within intellectual movements supposed to protect her, this assimilation of woman to a ‘being nothing', clears the way for a new beginning. Let us now assume the thought of ‘woman' as an empty but resistant essence, an essence that is resistant precisely because it is empty, a resistance that strikes down the impossibility of its own disappearance once and for all. To ask what remains of woman after the sacrifice of her being is to signal a new era in the feminist struggle, changing the terms of the battle to go beyond both essentialism and anti-essentialism. In this path-breaking work Catherine Malabou begins with philosophy, asking: what is the life of a woman philosopher?

This book aims to provide readers with an inclusive reading of Kristevan theories on subjectivity, focusing on semiotic and symbolic phases of the infant, abjection, melancholy, love and revolution. It presents three different types of novels from three well-known female authors in order to study their female characters, who are “subjects in process” trying to overcome their psychological maladies. In each part, different eras have been chosen to see how female subjectivity has changed throughout the Feminist Waves, starting from the Victorian period until the Third Wave. With its feminist stance, this book is expected to appeal to the students, researchers, and academicians, particularly those in the fields of sociocultural studies and literature.

In The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition, Nancy J. Chodorow brings together her two professional identities, psychoanalyst and sociologist, as she also brings together and moves beyond two traditions within American psychoanalysis, naming for the first time an American independent tradition. The book's chapters move inward, toward fine-tuned discussions of the theory and epistemology of the American independent tradition, which Chodorow locates originally in the writings of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald, and outward toward what Chodorow sees as a missing but necessary connection between psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and the social world. Chodorow suggests that Hans Loewald and Erik Erikson, self-defined ego psychologists, each brings in the intersubjective, attending to the fine-tuned interactions of mother and child, analyst and patient, and individual and social surround. She calls them intersubjective ego psychologists—for Chodorow, the basic theory and clinical epistemology of the American independent tradition. Chodorow describes intrinsic contradictions in psychoanalytic theory and practice that these authors and later American independents address, and she points to similarities between the American and British independent traditions. The American independent tradition, especially through the writings of Erikson, points the analyst and the scholar to individuality and society. Moving back in time, Chodorow suggests that from his earliest writings to his last works, Freud was interested in society and culture, both as these are lived by individuals and as psychoanalysis can help us to understand the fundamental processes that create them. Chodorow advocates for a return to these sociocultural interests for psychoanalysts. At the same time, she rues the lack of attention within the social sciences to the serious study of individuals and individuality and advocates for a field of individuology in the university.

Essential reading for our times, as women are pulling together to demand their rights— A landmark portrait of women, men, and power in a transformed world. “Anchored by data and aromatized by anecdotes, [Rosin] concludes that women are gaining the upper hand." –The Washington Post Men have been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But Hanna Rosin was the first to notice that this long-held truth is, astonishingly, no longer true. Today, by almost every measure, women are no longer gaining on men: They have pulled decisively ahead. And “the end of men”—the title of Rosin’s Atlantic cover story on the subject—has entered the lexicon as dramatically as Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex,” Susan Faludi’s “backlash,” and Naomi Wolf’s “beauty myth” once did. In this landmark book, Rosin reveals how our current state of affairs is radically shifting the power dynamics between men and women at every level of society, with profound implications for marriage, sex, children, work, and more. With wide-ranging curiosity and insight unhampered by assumptions or ideology, Rosin shows how the radically different ways men and women today earn, learn, spend, couple up—even kill—has turned the big picture upside down. And in The End of Men she helps us see how, regardless of gender, we can adapt to the new reality and channel it for a better future.