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In this book, Ellen Toronto reveals the dissociation of maternal subjectivity from human experience and provides a psychoanalytic exploration of the (non-)history of motherhood to make possible an understanding and appreciation of maternal worlds.
The persistent patriarchal order acknowledges the mother's existence largely as a 'womb', a bearer of children, and although her role is essential in the service of the species, we know very little of her story as a person. The absent presence of the mother as an individual subject and collective ignorance about her experiences has constituted an existential trauma, that is, a trauma of non-existence, and it is only by revealing this dissociation, Toronto argues, that we can begin to excavate the stories of individual mothers as they have borne and raised the world's children, and at last realise that the burdens they carry belong to us all.
As a fulsome account of the maternal perspective, which draws from a variety of sources - including historical research, mythological stories and clinical case material - this book will be significant for students of psychoanalysis, feminism and history, as well as psychoanalysts in training and in practice who seek a richer understanding of maternal being.
List of contents
Introduction 1. The Feminine Unconscious 2. The Application of Therapist's Maternal Capacity 3. Clytemnestra: A Mythical Madness 4. The Old Testament: Mother as Womb 5. Quilters: Remnants of Women's Lives 6. Old Testament Remnants in Psychoanalysis 7. Relational Theory and the "Absent Presence" 8. The Maternal Body in Psychoanalysis 9. A Theory of Matricide 10. The Case of Tina 11. If the Ego is a Body Ego... 12. Maternal Grief/Maternal Madness 13. Time Out of Mind: Dissociation in the Virtual World 14. Maternal Trauma 15. The Dissociated Maternal Self 16. An Eternal Enigma 17. Resolutions
About the author
Ellen Toronto is an author and psychoanalyst practicing in Spring, Texas. She has published extensively on gender issues and non-verbal communication. She is first editor of
Into the Void: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on a Gender-Free Case and
A Womb of Her Own. She and her husband have four sons and eleven grandchildren.
Summary
In this book, Ellen Toronto reveals the dissociation of maternal subjectivity from human experience and provides a psychoanalytic exploration of the (non-)history of motherhood to make possible an understanding and appreciation of maternal worlds.
