The Creative Feminine and her Discontents PDF Download

Author: Juliet Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429920415
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The Creative Feminine and her Discontents, Psychotherapy, Art, and Destruction, is a look at creativity from a woman's perspective. By looking at artistic endeavour, mothering and psychotherapeutic relationships, Juliet Miller considers how a patriarchal world distorts the channels through which women discover their own creative voices. She argues that the dynamics of female creativity are more multi-layered and conflicted for women for a variety of historical, cultural and archetypal reasons and suggests that an attack on the creative feminine has been exacerbated by the history and teaching of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Miller looks to the artistic community to discover new ways for the creative feminine to grow and assesses how ideas of destruction and anarchy are crucial for the expression of a feminine self. The work of two contemporary sculptors, Cornelia Parker and Louise Bourgeois, is explored to show how there can be authentic relationships to creativity through the ideas of deconstruction and reconstruction in their work. This book will interest psychotherapists and analysts and both women and men interested in their own relationship to their creativity.

Author: Juliet Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367327651
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
This book is an attempt to look at creativity from a female perspective. By looking at artistic endeavour, mothering and psychotherapeutic relationships, Juliet Miller considers how a patriarchal world distorts the channels through which women discover their own creative voices. She argues that the dynamics of female creativity are more multi- laye

Author: Juliet Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000204987
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
In this intimate study Juliet Miller maps the artworks that have influenced her throughout her life and examines how she has integrated them into her development as a psychotherapist. Working from the premise that our initial reactions to art provide a crucial key to self-analysis, Miller interrogates the significance of different artists, including Bourgeois, Vermeer, Rousseau and Kahlo, and analyses how personal circumstances, recollections and emotions have affected responses to their work. Chapters incorporate clinical material from Miller’s practice, linking into her own anxieties about sitting with and connecting with patients, and touching on themes including creativity, character, identity and communication. Through this exploration she questions many of the conventions of art and psychotherapy and suggests ways in which looking at art can be used as a psychological tool. Art, Memoir and Jung offers a highly personal and innovative perspective on meaning in art and how it can be used to explore Jungian thought as based in the aesthetic, and how the aesthetic can inform depth psychology.

Author: Elisabeth Bronfen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400864739
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
Surrealist writer André Breton praised hysteria for being the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century, but many physicians have since viewed it as the "wastebasket of medicine," a psychosomatic state that defies attempts at definition and cure and that can be easily mistaken for other pathological conditions. In light of a resurgence of critical interest in hysteria, leading feminist scholar Elisabeth Bronfen reinvestigates medical writings and cultural performance to reveal the continued relevance of a disorder widely thought to be a romantic formulation of the past. Through a critical rereading, she develops a new concept of hysteria, one that challenges traditional gender-based theories linking it to dissatisfied feminine sexual desire. Bronfen turns instead to hysteria's traumatic causes, particularly the fear of violation, and shows how the conversion of psychic anguish into somatic symptoms can be interpreted today as the enactment of personal and cultural discontent. Tracing the development of cultural formations of hysteria from the 1800s to the present, this book explores the writings of Freud, Charcot, and Janet together with fictional texts (Radcliffe, Stoker, Anne Sexton), opera (Mozart, Wagner), cinema (Cronenberg, Hitchcock, Woody Allen), and visual art (Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Cindy Sherman). Each of these creative works attests to a particular relationship between hysteria and self-fashioning, and enables us to read hysteria quite literally as a language of discontent. The message broadcasted by the hysteric is one of vulnerability: vulnerability of the symbolic, of identity, and of the human body itself. Throughout this work, Bronfen not only offers fresh approaches to understanding hysteria in our culture, but also introduces a new metaphor to serve as a theoretical tool. Whereas the phallus has long dominated psychoanalytical discourse, the image of the navel--a knotted originary wound common to both genders--facilitates discussion of topics relevant to hysteria, such as trauma, mortality, and infinity. Bronfen's insights make for a lively, innovative work sure to interest readers across the fields of art and literature, feminism, and psychology. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Stephanie Coontz
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465022324
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it. In A Strange Stirring, historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolution had barely begun, newspapers advertised for "perky, attractive gal typists," but married women were told to stay home, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, and challenging both conservative and liberal myths about Friedan, A Strange Stirring brilliantly illuminates how a generation of women came to realize that their dissatisfaction with domestic life didn't't reflect their personal weakness but rather a social and political injustice.

Author: Betty Friedan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393322572
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 587

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Book Description
The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold.

Author: Michael J. Diamond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000405826
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
Offering a uniquely psychoanalytic developmental perspective on male gender identity and the sense of maleness, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the development of masculinity in childhood and its continued evolution throughout a man’s life. Drawing on classical Freudian theory, as well as on more contemporary psychoanalytic theories, this book explores early infancy and child development, preoedipal factors and the oedipal complex, the influence of parenting and the unconscious transmission of gendered factors both by mothers and both biological and symbolic fathers, the male ego ideal, social, cultural, and biological influences, the role of inherent psychic bi-genderality in the context of gender binaries, and the inherent gendered tensions and challenges experienced as an individual progresses into adult and later life. This book is original in its characterization of the male developmental trajectory as underpinned by psychoanalytic principles pertaining to conflict and inherent tensions that continue throughout the life cycle and strongly impact other areas of life. Deeply rooted in the unconscious, a man’s multiply determined sense of masculinity requires deconstructing the mother, the feminine, and the other in the male psyche. As the text illustrates via clinical vignettes, an awareness and an understanding of these areas can improve the clinical work of psychoanalysts working with men who struggle with the intrinsic conflicts in their sense of maleness. This book will be of great clinical value to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, and will stimulate the thinking of scholars in such areas as gender theory, psychodynamic and sociocultural aspects of gender roles, and the changing social definition of masculinity.

Author: Simone De Beauvoir
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525563415
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
“Like man, woman is a human being.” When The Second Sex was first published in Paris in 1949—groundbreaking, risqué, brilliantly written and strikingly modern—it provoked both outrage and inspiration. The Independent Woman contains three key chapters of Beauvoir’s masterwork, which illuminate the feminine condition and identify practical social reforms for gender equality. It captures the essence of the spirited manifesto that switched on light bulbs in the heads of a generation of women and continues to exert profound influence on feminists today.

Author: Antoinette Fouque
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538383
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Antoinette Fouque cofounded the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) in France in 1968 and spearheaded its celebrated Psychanalyse et Politique, a research group that informed the cultural and intellectual heart of French feminism. Rather than reject Freud's discoveries on the pretext of their phallocentrism, Fouque sought to enrich his thought by more clearly defining the difference between the sexes and affirming the existence of a female libido. By recognizing women's contribution to humanity, Fouque hoped "uterus envy," which she saw as the mainspring of misogyny, could finally give way to gratitude and by associating procreation with women's liberation she advanced the goal of a parity-based society in which men and women could write a new human contract. The essays, lectures, and dialogues in this volume finally allow English-speaking readers to access the breadth of Fouque's creativity and activism. Touching on issues in history and biography, politics and psychoanalysis, Fouque recounts her experiences running the first women's publishing house in Europe; supporting women under threat, such as Aung San Suu Kyi, Taslima Nasrin, and Nawal El Saadaoui; and serving as deputy in the European Parliament. Her theoretical explorations discuss the ongoing development of feminology, a field she initiated, and, while she celebrates the progress women have made over the past four decades, she also warns against the trends of counterliberation: the feminization of poverty, the persistence of sexual violence, and the rise of religious fundamentalism.

Author: Joy Dixon
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801875307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Honorable Mention for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical AssociationChosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2003 In 1891, newspapers all over the world carried reports of the death of H. P. Blavatsky, the mysterious Russian woman who was the spiritual founder of the Theosophical Society. With the help of the equally mysterious Mahatmas who were her teachers, Blavatsky claimed to have brought the "ancient wisdom of the East" to the rescue of a materialistic West. In England, Blavatsky's earliest followers were mostly men, but a generation later the Theosophical Society was dominated by women, and theosophy had become a crucial part of feminist political culture. Divine Feminine is the first full-length study of the relationship between alternative or esoteric spirituality and the feminist movement in England. Historian Joy Dixon examines the Theosophical Society's claims that women and the East were the repositories of spiritual forces which English men had forfeited in their scramble for material and imperial power. Theosophists produced arguments that became key tools in many feminist campaigns. Many women of the Theosophical Society became suffragists to promote the spiritualizing of politics, attempting to create a political role for women as a way to "sacralize the public sphere." Dixon also shows that theosophy provides much of the framework and the vocabulary for today's New Age movement. Many of the assumptions about class, race, and gender which marked the emergence of esoteric religions at the end of the nineteenth century continue to shape alternative spiritualities today.