Experience of maternal absence manifests in a variety of ways and this book explores a selection of its emotional, psychical, and somatic consequences as they relate to an individual’s relationship with their body, psychic-emotional internal life, and intimate relationships. This book is not about mothers, but how individuals handle the trauma of mothers they have not had. Spanning backgrounds such as the collective child-rearing method of the kibbutz in Israel through to the possible difficulties of children who are parented by single parents, born out of sperm or egg donation, and adults who have suffered chronic sexual abuse, Shapira-Berman observes the precarious position of the analyst and the tension between the acts of witnessing and participating in client interventions. Espousing the values of authenticity and creativity, this text concludes with a reconfiguration of the roles of faith and trust within psychoanalysis and offers hope to those on their therapeutic journeys. This book will be a valuable resource for psychotherapists, as well as for various undergraduate and postgraduate studies in object relations, childhood trauma, sexual trauma and clinical therapy.

In this book, Yael Pilowsky Bankirer reads into Freud's writings with the unique prism of circumcision as a marker for both the formation of masculine identity, and for matricide, the disappearance of the mother. Pilowsky Bankirer uses Freud’s idea of circumcision within a text as a Leitfossil: a key-fossil through which an unresolved unconscious conflict can be traced. She conducts a close reading of Freud’s texts – including Little Hans, The Wolf Man, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism – to illuminate and uncover the textual unconscious, deconstruct the explicit narrative and open alternative psychoanalytic possibilities inherent to the encounter with the maternal realm. Throughout the volume, Pilowsky Bankirer informs her analysis by considering the work of Freud in tandem with that of Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Benjamin, Butler and more. Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Masculine and the Maternal: Uncovering the Image of Circumcision in Freud’s Works will be of interest to scholars of psychoanalysis and practising analysts alike, particularly those interested in the intersection of gender studies and psychoanalysis.

In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.

Julia Kristeva works at a crucial intersection of contemporary disciplines: psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, literary criticism, feminism, postmodern philosophy, and religious studies. This volume examines this rich body of work and the ways in which its interdisciplinary style gives insight into problems in understanding religion. Special attention is given to two related themes: the understanding of woman in relation to religion and the role of mother (especially of mother's body) in the formation of self and of a religious discourse. Issues recurrent in the essays include the problem of ethics; the relation between discourse and the life of the body; the formation and sublimation of narcissism; the pre-Oedipal function of the father; the functions of fantasy, imagination, and art; the relation of religion to the negation of woman; and the possibility of positive and playful religion. The themes of the relation between the symbolic structures of language and a pre-symbolic semiotics of the infant body, of the split and decentered subject, and of the opposition between desire and Jouissance (ecstatic enjoyment) participate in organizing the discussion. Abjection and sacrifice in religion, the dynamics of Christian love and faith, the relation between the doctrine of the Virgin Mary and the experience of motherhood, and the question of feminism and its sometimes quasi-religious forms are also thematic.

Psychoanalytic Thinking on the Unhoused Mind illuminates the psychological underpinnings of current societal problems: homelessness, mental distress, loneliness and states of societal breakdown and exclusion. Illustrated with a broad range of clinical work as well as thoughts on art and literature, the book brings to life complex tensions between the individual psyche, the group, and wider political and cultural structures. ‘Unhoused’ states of mind are explored in rough sleepers, ex-prisoners, survivors of institutional abuse and family trauma, and people living with personality disorder, addiction, psychosis and dementia. Chapters describe outreach, assessment and long-term psychotherapy, as well as reflective practice with staff teams and care systems, and learning from consultation, supervision and policy development. New therapeutic responses to chronic risk and to resilience are developed from psychoanalytic understandings of difficulties with containment and care. The collection will be of value to psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, as well as those working in therapeutic, residential and criminal justice settings and outreach services.

Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is the first book to explore the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the phantom for the study of narrative literature. A phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another. The "haunted" individual to whom the "encrypted" secret is communicated becomes the unwitting medium for someone else's voice--and the result is speech and conduct that appear incongruous or obsessive in a variety of ways. Through close readings of texts by Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Balzac, James, and Poe, Esther Rashkin reveals how shameful secrets, concealed within the unspoken family histories of fictive characters, can be reconstructed from their linguistic traces and can be shown not only to drive the characters' speech and behavior but also to generate their narratives. First articulated by the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the theory of the phantom here represents a radical departure from Freudian, Lacanian, and other psychoanalytic approaches to literary interpretation. In Rashkin's hands, it also provides a response to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of character analysis, an alternative to deconstructive strategies of reading, and a new vantage point from which to consider problems of intertextuality, "authorship," and the formation and origins of narrative. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Infinite Infantile and the Psychoanalytic Task is a fascinating collection of essays that proposes to restore and elaborate original conceptions of the complexity of mental processes in the early years of life until the onset of adolescence, and from then until adulthood. This book, led by the Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis (COCAP) of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), commits to shedding light on new developments in theory and practice in this area. Each chapter offers an expression of current thinking and clinical work with child and adolescent patients, as well as with their parents, families, and community. The complex contributions by brilliant and erudite scholars offer a fresh take on the existing body of thought on infancy and childhood in psychoanalysis that will challenge and enlighten readers of all backgrounds. Within these perspectives, the development of internal and external bonds is the focus, as well as a consideration of how analysts work in their time with young patients at these key moments of the life cycle. With their expertise in childhood, the contributors share complex views on the link between analysis with young children and psychoanalysis with adults, making it an essential read for child and adolescent psychoanalysts in practice and in training.

The Hillsborough stadium disaster of 15 April 1989 and the death of Princess Diana on 31 August 1997 sparked expressivist scenes of public mourning hitherto unseen within the context of British society. The largely local displays of grief witnessed on Merseyside following the Hillsborough disaster were, however, repeated and provided a pre-text for the national (and global) public mourning which accompanied the death of Princess Diana. What was it, this book asks, about the Hillsborough disaster and death of Princess Diana that provoked such strong emotions? Why and how did these ostensibly similar events produce such contrasting reactions, moving some people, including the book’s author, to mourn one event but resist the mourning for the other? Mourning and Disaster provides an insight into a series of questions raised by the public mourning that followed these two events. What, for example, do the messages contained in the public books of condolence signed in the wake of these events tell us either about the social identities of the people who mourned or about the processes of meaning-making by which death is apprehended and understood? What do condolence books tell us about how contemporary society mourns and the ways in which loss is languaged? Is it the case that, in episodes of public mourning in which the deceased are not known to us personally, the mourner might actually be mourning some aspect of themselves? Is it also the case that in not mourning these events some aspect of one’s own identity or self was being repudiated or mourned? Drawing upon both the public books of condolence signed in Britain during the public mourning for these events, alongside the author’s own autobiographical memories of them, it is to these sorts of questions, amongst others, that this book seeks to provide answers.