The Female Body: Inside and Outside

Synopsis:

This 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.

Description:

‘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

Notes about the author(s):

Ingrid Moeslein-Teising is a psychoanalyst of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV/IPA), group analyst (DAGG), a doctor in psychosomatic medicine working in private practice, and a senior consultant in an inpatient psychosomatic clinic (Klinik am Hainberg, Bad Hersfeld). She teaches at the Alexander-Mitscherlich-Institute, Kassel. Her scientific interests, publications and presentations focus on the woman in psychoanalysis - her sexuality, her body, her history. She is a committee member of the IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP).

Frances Thomson-Salo is an Honorary Principal Fellow of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, and a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and immediate past President of the Australian Psychoanalytical Association. She is Chair of COWAP and a member of the Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute; the Consultant Infant Mental Health clinician, Royal Women's Hospital Centre, Melbourne; and is on the teaching faculty for the University of Melbourne Graduate Diploma/Masters in Infant and Parent Mental Health. She is the Psychoanalyst-in-residence for The Dax Centre of artworks and has published in the fields of child psychoanalysis and infant mental health.