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Daphne de Marneffe is a psychologist who has been known in the psychoanalytic community for her study (1997) of how children become aware of gender and relate it to genital awareness. In that she added developmental research evidence to the assertion of Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer (1985) that little girls are aware of having a genital and want to keep what they have, thus refuting Freud's idea that little girls believe themselves to be boys and believe themselves to have had a penis, thus seeing their own “lack” of a penis as a castration. This was a great contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of female development. Now de Marneffe has written a book. I was eager to read it.
What happens when a very well educated young woman who has done analytic research under the mentorship of one of the leading feminist psychoanalysts of the last decade decides to become a mother and leave her practice to devote herself to motherhood? In this instance, she produces Maternal Desire. The book is based on a paper she delivered at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In that paper she expanded her horizon to consider the relation of the adult woman to her genital strivings. She proposed that what a woman really wants is to be a mother and stay home to take care of her babies. I had discussed that paper and was eager to see what she had done with the idea when she expanded it into a book.
This is a book written for a wide audience. It seems aimed at young women who are thinking about having babies, and it urges them to enjoy being full-time, or almost full-time, mothers. The pleasures and satisfactions of being a (mostly) stay-at-home mom are extolled on page after page. The joys of motherhood are described in glowing