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An impetus for this enduring book on maternal life was a young mother's loss for words. In Daphne de Marneffe's personally anchored account of maternal experience, she tells us about her sputtering silence when a respected mentor remarked on her “lack of professional productivity” after de Marneffe became a mother. De Marneffe is a clinical psychologist, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and the mother of three children. This encounter was soon followed by a conversation with her obstetrician in which de Marneffe found herself saying she had “turned into a fifties housewife.” She felt disturbed by the impact of her mentor's rebuke. She noticed how “strangely inarticulate” she felt about the unfolding and unexpected experience of deep satisfaction in her mothering. De Marneffe's book, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life, first published in 2004 and now issued in a second edition, is her effort to give voice to the experience and development of maternal desire. She has updated this edition with illustrative clinical vignettes and a recognition of increased gender role fluidity and family arrangements. She notes that in this new edition she has taken “special care to differentiate the subjective experience of maternal desire from mothers' choices” (p. 4) about time spent with their children. She seeks to offer “a framework of thinking about women's desire to care for their children in a way that is consistent with feminist ideals and free from sentimentality” (p. 21).
While the starting point for her writing is personal, de Marneffe brings her clinical knowledge and a multitude of scholarly sources to this deep dive into the maternal experience. Her writing will likely be helpful to women embarking on motherhood. She provides guideposts to orient those in the proverbial trenches of parenting babies or young children. Her discourse also speaks directly to women and couples struggling with questions of how to balance professional and parenting aspiratio