The Mermaid and the Minotaur - The Classic Work of Feminist Thought

Zusatztext “A feminist classic that issued a call for the fundamental reorganization of society’s gender expectations, especially regarding childrearing…Dinnerstein’s message has become sadly urgent again.” — New York Review of Books “This book is a game-changer.” —Gloria Steinem, from her introduction “To the very largest degree this book is exciting and valuable and belongs in every prominent library of feminist thought. Dinnerstein writes beautifully, often eloquently, and she argues brilliantly…a stirring view of the common psychic life of men and women and its relation to the whole of organized human history.” —Vivian Gornick, New York Times Book Review “The most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration thus far. Its re-publication is a celebratory occasion…The book is disturbing—almost frightening—in certain parts of its analysis. Truly facing and understanding its message, however, is an act of liberation.”—Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil   “A seminal text in the women’s movement.” —Ethel S. Person, author of  The Sexual Century “[ The Mermaid and the Minotaur ] continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere.” —Jessica Benjamin, author of  The Bonds of Love Informationen zum Autor Dorothy Dinnerstein was born in a poor Jewish section of the Bronx, New York, in 1923. As a psychologist, she worked with such luminaries as Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer, and Solomon Asch. She was a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University for thirty years and lived in New Jersey until her death in a car accident in 1992. Klappentext One of the most significant and enduring texts in psychology and gender studies, now with a new introduction by Gloria Steinem. Since its publication in 1976, Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur has been recognized as one of the most important contributions to modern feminist thought. The book, translated into at least seven languages, is widely used in women's studies courses and is an influential text outside academia as well. Comparing Dinnerstein's book to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, one reviewer declared that this groundbreaking essay not only belongs in "every feminist library" but in the "library of every well-educated person." In this work, Dinnerstein challenges the ideology underlying the female monopoly of childcare. A seminal feminist text, The Mermaid and the Minotaur brilliantly integrates feminist theory with Kleinian psychoanalytical theory. Leseprobe Terms and Aims Myth-images of half-human beasts like the mermaid and the minotaur express an old, fundamental, very slowly clarifying communal insight: that our species’ nature is internally inconsis­tent; that our continuities with, and our differences from, the earth’s other animals are mysterious and profound;  and that in these continuities, and these differences, lie both our sense of strangeness on earth and the possible key to a way of feeling at home here. As this cryptically stated dream-insight gradually translates it­self into active waking language, a body of central human proj­ects emerges. One of these (and I shall be pointing throughout this book to its place among the others) is the project of loosen­ing and restructuring the rigid forms of symbiosis, of fixed psy­chological complementarity, which have so far dominated rela­tions between women and men. It is not my intent here to urge this project upon the reader. To arrive at for oneself and communicate to others a sense of press­ing necessity, a feeling of “must,” is of course an essential part of the mental work that moves such a project forward. But another essential part of t...

Product details

• Authors: Dorothy Dinnerstein, Gloria Steinem
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 28.02.2021
• EAN: 9781635420944
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-094-4
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 200 mm x 25 mm
• Subjects: Guides > Health; Humanities, art, music > Psychology > Psychoanalysis