My Basket 0 item - £0.00

On Resisting Women

Author(s) : Michaela Chamberlain

Reviews and Endorsements

Once again, Michaela Chamberlain has written a lucid, intriguing, and far-reaching book on what psychoanalysis can do to and for women. The combination of scholarly research, wit, and clinical insight – written, as it is, with a remarkable lightness of touch and strikingly imaginative sympathy – is a tonic in the often desultory and earnest world of psychoanalytic writing. On Resisting Women, starting with its title, is a useful and inspiring work.
Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and writer

This is an important and concise book about the unwelcome pervasive misogyny of our culture. Trained in psychoanalysis, Michaela Chamberlain examines how it too sustains misogyny; both through its foundational texts and through what happens in therapy. Communication always has a sociopolitical context, and this cannot be escaped in any therapeutic alliance or its interpretations. Courageously, Chamberlain illustrates, through personal experiences, the need for changing the intransigent patriarchal cultures we are complicit in. Despite established criticisms of patriarchy in psychoanalysis, Chamberlain laments their continuing lack of integration into the training of therapists.
Dr Jane M. Selby, Charles Sturt University; clinical psychologist; co-author of Babies in Groups

In this lively and very readable book, Michaela Chamberlain sets another challenge to the world in general and the psychoanalytic world in particular. In a scholarly and human way, she lays bare not only the ubiquity of misogyny but its utter disavowal, even in places where otherwise disavowal is understood as a matter of pathology which requires investigation. She then takes the reader through some of the consequences for men and women of this loss of the equal attention to the lived experiences of women and mothers. This book will be of general interest and to trainers of future clinicians.
Dr Jan McGregor Hepburn, psychoanalytic psychotherapist; psychotherapy trainer; former registrar, British Psychoanalytic Council

On Resisting Women is a sober examination of how misogyny informs the praxis of psychoanalysis, from Freud’s treatment of Dora to contemporary institutional practices that silence women’s voices. A cri de cœur, Chamberlain implores us to examine the inheritances of the “misogynistic introject” which continue to be pernicious and corrosive. I recommend On Resisting Women as essential reading for clinicians and institutes committed to addressing the ongoing enactments of misogyny in our field.
Christopher Russell, psychoanalyst; faculty, Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, NY

Michaela Chamberlain’s book is a profound testament to the paradox at the heart of psychoanalysis: that it is deeply haunted by misogyny, even as it offers some of our most incisive tools for unveiling and challenging it. But it requires a rare and radical form of courage to use psychoanalytic thinking to reveal the layers of misogyny not only in the world but also embedded within psychoanalysis itself. Chamberlain writes with precisely that courage.
Helena Vissing, PsyD, Associate Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies; author of Somatic Maternal Healing