The Mother's Hands: Desire, Fantasy and the Inheritance of the Maternal PDF Download

Author: Massimo Recalcati
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150953170X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In this book the bestselling author and psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati offers a fundamental re-examination of what ‘being a mother’ means today, in a world where new social and sexual freedoms mean that motherhood is no longer the sole destiny of women. Questioning the belief that a mother’s love is natural and unconditional, he paints a more complex and troubling picture of the mother–child relationship, observing that mothers may even resent their children as a result of unresolved conflicts between different dimensions of love. The mother’s hands not only nurture but can also potentially harm. Recalcati argues that it is precisely in these competing demands that motherhood fulfils its function: only if the mother is ‘not-all-mother’ can a child experience the absence that enables it to access the symbolic and cultural world. Recalcati cuts through conventional wisdom to offer a fresh perspective on the changing nature of motherhood today. An international bestseller, this book will appeal to a wide general readership, as well as to students and scholars of gender studies, psychoanalysis and related disciplines.

Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350112852
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Italian philosophy constitutes one of the most vibrant and fruitful areas in contemporary thought, bringing extraordinary novelty to some of the oldest tropes, from human nature to the relation between political power and life, the thinking of actuality and potential, and the nature of work and labour. This reader includes texts by the most renowned thinkers, from Dante and Machiavelli to Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito, all of which are introduced by an expert on the particular thinker, and situated within the context of their work as a whole. The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader provides a unique resource for students and scholars alike, covering the history of Italian thought to the present day.

Author: Massimo Recalcati
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509548807
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 69

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Book Description
Modern social and political life is characterized not only by a passion for freedom and a desire for human contact, but also by the urge to shut down, to refuse freedom and the responsibility that goes with it, to barter it away in return for our security: this is the temptation of the wall, a temptation with which every modern society has to come to terms. Drawing on his experience as a psychoanalyst, Recalcati shows that the temptation of the wall is rooted in a deep psychological inclination: human beings have always drawn up borders and rejected the risks associated with being open to the outside world. But when these borders are turned into walls, they can only result in an impoverishment of the value of exchange and the loss of the dynamic plurality of a life shared with others.

Author: Anna Lisa Tota
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000998487
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
How many words do we use in a day? How many of them are actually necessary to convey the flow of our thoughts? And how many could we do without, if we were to fast, abstain from using words? This book examines the power of words. It explores the links between communication, language and identity, arguing for a certain gravity to the practice of speech, for offering only meaningful words to the people we talk to. We are the words we hear and utter, we are the words we think, and Anna Lisa Tota invites us to use “eco-words” to change the world we live in: “This book is a proposal to myself and to you, dear Reader, an invitation to change together: while you read and while I write, bridging the temporal and spatial gap that separates us and makes it impossible for us to help each other”. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the everyday practice of communication. It will also be useful to scholars and students of sociology, emotion, memory, body studies, philosophy, aesthetics, communication studies, psychology, and linguistics.

Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135360103
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Author: Massimo Recalcati
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509542507
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
The kiss is the image that, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the beauty and poetry of love. Every love is required to maintain the kiss, to make it last. When they kiss, lovers carve out their hiding holes, finding their peace from war. When they kiss, the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity. They fall together in their distinct, embraced tongues. The kiss joins the tongue that declares love with the body of the lover. And the extinction of the kiss and, most importantly, of the desire to kiss one’s beloved announces the demise of love. In this short book, Massimo Recalcati – one of Italy’s leading intellectuals and bestselling authors – offers seven brief lessons on the mystery and miracle of love, from the serendipity of the first encounter to its end or its continuation over time, as mysterious and miraculous as the first encounter itself.

Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307957330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Author: Naomi J Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351753177
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: Care-givers in the early modern period included not only mothers and stepmothers, but also midwives and nurses, tutors and educators, wise women and witches. The contributors to this volume present research and criticism on a wide range of early modern care-giving roles by women in England, Italy, Spain, France, Latin America, Mexico and the New World. The essays are not only cross-cultural but also interdisciplinary, spanning literature, history, music and art history; and they focus on differences of gender, class and race. A wide variety of scholarly and critical approaches are represented. Essays are grouped in categories on conception and lactation; maternal nurture and instruction; domestic production; and social authority.

Author: Rosalind Mayo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317503600
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The question of what it means to be a mother is a very contentious topic in psychoanalysis and in wider society. The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond explores our relationship to the maternal through psychoanalysis, philosophy, art and political and gender studies. Over two years, a group of psychotherapists and members of the public met at the Philadelphia Association for a series of seminars on the Maternal. In the discussions that followed, a chasm opened up slowly and painfully between the idealised longings and fantasies we all share and the realities of maternal experiences: here were met the great silences of love, loss, longing, memories, desire, hatred and ambivalence. This book is the result of this bringing together in conversation and reflections of what so often seems unsayable about the Mother. It examines how issues of personal and gender identity are shaped by the ideals of separation from the mother, the fears and anxiety of merging with the mother, and how this has often led, in psychoanalysis and society, to holding mothers responsible for a variety of personal and social ills and problems in which maternal vulnerability is denied and silenced. There are two main themes running throughout the book: Matricide and Maternal Subjectivity. On the theme of matricide, several contributors discuss the ways in which the discourse and narratives of the Mother have been silenced on a sociocultural level and within psychoanalysis and philosophy in favour of discourses that promote independence, autonomy, power and the avoidance and denial of our fundamental helplessness and vulnerability. On the theme of maternal subjectivity, several chapters look at the actual experience of mothering and/or our relationship to our mother, to highlight the ways in which the maternal is intimately connected with human subjectivity. The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond provides new and provocative thinking about the maternal and its place in various contemporary discourses. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychologists of different schools, scholars and advanced students of art, gender studies, politics and philosophy as well as anyone interested in maternity studies and the relationship between the maternal and human subjectivity.

Author: Massimo Recalcati
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9781509531769
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This new book by Massimo Recalcati focuses on the psycho-social life of the son. Comparing and contrasting the tragic story of Oedipus by Sophocles and the parable of the prodigal son, Recalcati argues that all common parenting strategies, whether authoritarian or democratic, are attempts at sealing the fate of sons – that is, they are designed to ensure that sons realize the dreams and fantasies of the parents. But all that sons want – and this is their secret because they generally do not want, or are unable, to confront their parents directly – is to be recognized as unique, as different, as independent, free-thinking individuals who are able to chart their own path in life, rather than extensions of their parents' fantasies. The parents' task is to acknowledge this, and to create the space for this desire to flourish. Continuing his remarkable reflections on parents, children and family life, this new book by one of Italy's leading and bestselling public intellectuals will be of interest to a wide general readership.