Maternal Experience: Encounters with Ambivalence and Love

The Maternal Experience explores the universal experience of maternal ambivalence and how it can stimulate and enrich maternal love. It combines personal stories, psychoanalytic accounts, and social expectations to understand how maternal ambivalence operates and how it can be reframed as acceptable and transformative feelings.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 184 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2020
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The Maternal Experience delves into the profound and multifaceted nature of maternal ambivalence, challenging the traditional portrayal of mothers' lived experiences. By asserting that encounters with feelings of hatred are universal and possess the potential to ignite and enhance maternal love, the book disrupts the established narrative. Drawing from the authors' personal mothering experiences, as well as those of other women, and examples from film, the book inspires a fresh perspective on the everyday maternal journey. Lowy adopts a psychosocial approach to intertwine insights from selected psychoanalytic and contemporary accounts with personal anecdotes, exploring how maternal ambivalence functions and how mothering is rooted in the psychic conflicts between loving and hating feelings within the context of social and personal expectations and prohibitions. Through reimagining the experience of maternal ambivalence, the book establishes an understanding of mothers' feelings of hatred as a catalyst for their love, enabling these maligned and taboo emotions to be recognized, named, and reframed into acceptable and transformative sensations.

Illustrated with examples from film and firsthand experience, this book captivates scholars and students in psychology, maternal and womens studies, sociology, as well as practitioners in psychology, social work, medicine, and counseling.

Weight: 312g
Dimension: 155 x 235 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367223748