Forthcoming Titles
Understanding the Effects of Child Sexual Abuse
Feminist Revolutions in Theory, Research and Practice
- By Sam Warner
- Series Editor: Jane Ussher
Child sexual abuse is a global problem that negatively affects many women and girls. As such, it has long been of concern to feminists, and more recently mental health activists. Understanding the Effects of Child Sexual Abuse draws on this revolutionary legacy, feminism and post-structuralism to critically examine current perceptions of women, girls and child sexual abuse in psychology, psychiatry and the mass media, and to re-evaluate mainstream and feminist approaches to this subject.
The book aims to contribute to the ongoing development of a knowledge-base for working with abused women and girls, and demonstrates the need to question the use of formulaic methods in working with abused women and girls. It calls for an explicit concern with politics, principles and ethics in the related areas of theory, research and practice.
Using research into women who have been sexually abused in childhood, and who are detained in maximum security mental health care, Sam Warner explores and identifies key principles for practice. A social recovery model of intervention is developed, and case study examples are used to demonstrate its applicability in a range of practice areas. These include abuse psychotherapy; expert witness reports in child protection; with mothers of abused girls; and with women and girls in secure care contexts.
This thorough investigation of this emotive issue provides a clear theoretical and practical framework for understanding and coping with child sexual abuse. This book will be of interest to anyone who works with children and adults who have been sexually abused. This includes clinical psychologists, therapists and other professionals that work in mental health, psychotherapy and social services; and legal settings within both community and secure care contexts. It should also be essential reading for students and academics in this area.
Published August 6th 2008 by Routledge.
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Maternal Encounters
The Ethics of Interruption
- By Lisa Baraitser
- Series Editor: Jane Ussher
Many women find mothering a shocking experience in terms of the extremity of feelings it provokes, and the profound changes it seems to prompt in identity, relationship, and sense of self. However, although motherhood can catapult us into a state of internal disarray, it can also provide us with a unique chance to make ourselves anew. How then do we understand this radical potential for transformation within maternal experience? In Maternal Encounters, Lisa Baraitser takes up this question through the analysis of a series of maternal anecdotes, charting key destabilizing moments in the life of just one mother, and using these as points through which to discuss many questions that have remained resistant to theoretical analysis – the possibility for a specific feminine-maternal subjectivity, relationality and reciprocity, ethics and otherness.
Working across contemporary philosophies of feminist ethics, as well as psychoanalysis and social theory, the maternal subject, in Baraitser’s account, becomes an emblematic and enigmatic formation of a subjectivity 'called into being' through a relation to another she comes to name and claim as her child. As she navigates through the peculiarity of maternal experience, Baraitser takes us on a journey in which ‘the mother’ emerges in the most unlikely, precarious and unstable of places as a subject of alterity, transformation, interruption, heightened sentience, viscosity, encumberment and love.
This book presents a major new theory of maternal subjectivity, and an innovative and accessible way into our understanding of contemporary motherhood. As such it will be of interest to students of family studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis, critical psychology and feminist philosophy as well as counselling and family therapy.
Published November 14th 2008 by Routledge.
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Women and Depression
Recovery and Resistance
- By Michelle N. Lafrance
- Series Editor: Jane Ussher
Women and Depression: Recovery and Resistance takes a welcome look at women’s experiences of living well after depression. Lafrance argues that the social construction of femininity is dangerous for women’s health, and ultimately, central to their experiences of depression. Beginning with a critical examination of the ways in which women’s depression is a product of the social, political, and interpersonal realities of their everyday lives, the analysis moves on to explore an often ignored aspect of women’s experience – how women manage to ‘recover’ and be well after depression.
The book draws on extensive in-depth interviews with women who have been depressed, as well as on previous research and on analyses of representations of women’s health practices in the media. In this way Lafrance critically examines how women negotiate and actively resist hegemonic discourses of femininity in their struggles to recover from depression and be well. Threaded throughout the analysis is the exploration of a variety of subjects related to women’s distress and health, including:
- negotiating identity
- the medicalization of women’s misery
- women’s narratives of resistance
- the material and discursive context of women’s self-care
In exploring the taken-for-granted aspects of women’s experiences, Lafrance sheds light on the powerful but often invisible constraints on women’s wellbeing, and the multiple and creative ways in which they resist these constraints in their everyday lives. These insights will be of interest to students and scholars of psychology, sociology, women’s studies, social work, counseling, and nursing.
Published December 1st 2008 by Routledge.
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The Gendered Unconscious
Can Gender Discourses Subvert Psychoanalysis?
- By Louise Gyler
Feminist interventions in psychoanalysis have often attempted either to subvert or re-frame the masculinist and phallocentric biases of Freud's psychoanalysis. This book investigates the nature of these interventions by comparing the status and treatment of women in two different psychoanalytic models: the Kleinian and the feminist psychoanalytic models. It argues that, in fact, these interventions have historically tended to reinforce such biases by collapsing the distinction between the gendered minds of individuals and theories of gender.
This investigation is framed by three key claims. First, in assessing the position of women and the feminine in psychoanalysis, The Gendered Unconscious explores not only the ways they are represented in theory, but also how these representations function in practice. Secondly, using a framework of a comparative dialogue, this book explores the underlying assumptions and values that function both in theory and in clinical practice in the two psychoanalytic models. This comparative critique concludes with the counter-intuitive claim that contemporary Kleinian theory may, in practice, hold more radical possibilities for the interests of women than the practices derived from contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory.
This book will be of significant interest to those studying the psychology of women, psychoanalytic studies, health psychology, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to clinicians and candidates of professional psychotherapy and psychoanalytic training programmes.
Published March 1st 2009 by Routledge.
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Domestic Violence and Psychology
A Critical Perspective
- By Paula Nicolson
- Series Editor: Jane Ussher
Published September 1st 2009 by Routledge.
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THE MADNESS OF WOMEN
- By Jane Ussher
Published October 1st 2009 by Routledge.
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