A psychoanalyst uses storytelling to explore the complex and, for some women, all-consuming and difficult mother-daughter relationship. The prolific Chernin (My Life as a Boy, 1997; In My Father’s Garden, 1996; Crossing the Border, 1994; etc.) envisions the psychological life of women as made up of seven stages: idealizing the mother, seeing her from a new perspective and revising the idealized image, blaming the mother and feeling rage toward her, forgiving her, identifying with her, letting go of the attachment to her, and finally taking one’s life into one’s own hands. This latter stage is marked by a breakthrough moment that Chernin calls “giving birth to one’s mother.” The symbolic new mother can now give birth to the daughter’s new self, and thus is established a new mother-daughter relationship. To illustrate these stages, Chernin has created characters based loosely on real women she has known. The storytelling format varies: Sometimes Chernin introduces a character and has her tell her own mother-daughter story; sometimes Chernin narrates; sometimes Chernin and the storyteller interact in a dialogue. Yet there is a certain sameness to six of the seven stories—their main characters, whether abused, neglected, or controlled, seem to be singularly obsessed with their mothers. Only in the seventh, in which a mother recounts the ordeal of her daughter’s chaotic wedding preparations, does a bit of life-restoring humor emerge. Chernin presents her own mother and daughter in a banal epilogue that unintentionally raises the question of how differently those two might have written their scenes. Readers who identify with intense and troubled mother-daughter relationships may find Chernin’s views on women’s psychological development plausible and these accounts sympathetic and engrossing; others may find themselves muttering, “Get a life!”
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88096-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
Two long essays by longtime Freud nemesis Crews that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, along with reprints of 23 letters from psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners, and Crews's responses to them. Crews (The Critics Bear It Away, 1992, etc.) has read and written widely on Freud and modern psychoanalysis. In ``The Unknown Freud,'' the first essay here, he effectively summarizes recent revisionist scholarship on Freud and convincingly demonstrates that the founder of psychoanalysis often badgered patients into accepting his contrived, even bizarre, interpretations of their verbal material. Crews also provides some very telling evidence for his conclusion that ``Freud's scientific and ethical standards were abysmally low,'' as when the father of psychoanalysis strongly encouraged a wealthy patient of his to donate money for psychoanalytic study. ``The Revenge of the Repressed,'' the essay on ``recovered memory'' (by which adult patients supposedly are helped to remember childhood incidents of sexual abuse) is devastating in that it demonstrates the often empirically spurious nature of therapeutic evidence of abuse. But this essay also is far more problematic than the first, in part because Crews tries to trace a direct line between Freud's somewhat indistinct conception of ``repression'' and recovered memory therapists' claims concerning the repression of trauma. Crews also considerably undermines his case through some selective quoting out of context and through recurrent, rancorous polemical overkill. For example, he claims that advocates of the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder ``constitute the Satan-fearing, lunatic fringe of present- day psychiatry.'' He apparently is so obsessed with refuting his adversaries' views that he sometimes barely listens to, much less engages, them. Thus, the letters serve little purpose other than providing material for his sometimes intellectually scintillating, but often gratuitously snide, rhetorical counter-thrusts. Like Freud himself, penetrating but flawed.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-940322-04-8
Page Count: 314
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
Mitchell and Black bring clarity to the complex, confusing world of contemporary psychoanalysis. More specifically, they outline the development of what Mitchell, an analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, has elsewhere called ``relational concepts'' in psychoanalysis. That is, they trace the shift from Freud's drive- based theory, in which relationships with other people are secondary to one's internal wishes and needs, to more recent theories in which the impulse to relate to others is seen as primary. Ego is privileged over id and analysis is viewed as a joint, subjective effort by patient and analyst, rather than as objective interpretation by the analyst alone. Mitchell and Black (of the National Institute for Psychology) offer a lucid discussion of many major psychoanalytic thinkers, using case histories to illustrate the application of their ideas. Melanie Klein offers a dark view of life as an attempt to balance aggressive and libidinal impulses. Object-relations theorist D.W. Winnicott highlights the role of parenting in the development of an authentic sense of self. Erik Erikson considers the cultural context for ego development, and Heinz Kohut the need for the analyst to understand the patient's internal state of mind. Even the obscure work of French analyst Jacques Lacan becomes almost comprehensible in the authors' capable hands. Mitchell has covered much of this material elsewhere (most powerfully in Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, not reviewed). And one should be wary of the subtitle: Given the ``relational'' perspective here, much is omitted, such as Jungian thought, and as important a thinker as Karen Horney is mentioned only in passing in a brief overview of feminist critiques of psychoanalysis. So this volume is by no means comprehensive. But it is an excellent starting place for anyone unfamiliar with the radical shift psychoanalytic thinking has undergone since Freud.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-01404-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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