Description
Book SynopsisThis book gathers together a number of cutting edge contributions about the female body, inside and out, from a large group of psychoanalysts who are at the forefront of new thinking about issues of femininity, the female body, sex and gender. It explores the female body in art, in pregnancy and motherhood, in sexuality and in the life-cycle, and finally the female body as scene of crime. As a result this book covers aspects of female creativity in its many aspects, both productive and generative and where there are difficulties or impediments. The psychoanalysts writing for this book have made an enormous contribution in the past and this book therefore aims to stimulate, challenge and provoke further discussion and new advances in this field.
Trade Review'The Female Body: Inside and Outside addresses a topic that has fascinated and challenged psychoanalysis since its inception. Here, we find experienced clinicians reflecting on fertility and procreation, on maternal fantasies both generative and destructive, on the female life cycle, and on disturbances and perversions of female body and self. Several chapters focus on portrayals of female bodies in art, literature, and culture. Particularly welcome is the range of contributors from different countries, which shows how much our views of and attention to sexuality and embodiment are shaped by the psychoanalytic and cultural worlds from which we come. This volume shows us how inside and outside are both, in endlessly complex ways, part of female embodiment and its psychic representation.'- Nancy J Chodorow, PhD, training and supervising analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, lecturer on psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Professor emerita of sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and author of several books
Table of ContentsSeries Editor’s Foreword -- Introduction -- The Female Body in Art -- The female body in Western art: adoration, attraction and horror -- How deep is the skin? Surface and depth in Lucian Freud’s female nudes -- Alberto Giacometti’s Caress/Despite the Hands: Developing and vanished life as a reversible figure—nucleus of an adequate expression of the struggle for the acknowledgment of space and time? -- Pregnancy and Motherhood -- The female cauldron: reproductive body schemata fore-grounded by infertility -- The Medea Fantasy: An evitable burden during prenatal diagnostics? Psychoanalysis, gender and medicine in dialogue -- Inside the mother’s womb: the Mother-Embryo-Dialogue -- The Body as a Scene of Crime -- The female body as cultural playground -- Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete)—or: rage, body and hysteria -- Vicissitudes of female revenge -- Sexuality and the Female Body in the Life Cycle -- Female sexuality beyond gender dichotomy -- Change and renewal in a woman’s life -- Menopause dreams -- Afterword
