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This eloquent book, a collection of papers, concentrates on the pivotal events of a woman's lifecycle - adolescence, pregnancy, childbirth, the menopause and old age. It looks at the psychological tasks precipitated by these events - or their absence as in the case of infertility - and, by including a wealth of case studies, it illustrates how individual women have come to terms with their biological reality.
From the outset the book is distinguished by its fluency and subtlety as it details the complex interplay between external and internal reality. Such is the eloquence of Dr Pines’ writing in the introduction, where she puts together her own family circumstances and historical events after the Second World War, that I found myself regretting that this book wasn't to continue as an autobiography. But then perhaps there is something autobiographical in these essays, expressed in the obvious empathy Dr Pines has for her patients and her deep interest in the life cycle, the continuation of which has such importance for an optimistic and reparative view of life.
The book's predominant theme - how women learn to translate psychic pain into physical suffering in an attempt to bypass the psychic process of suffering intolerable pain - is introduced in the first paper, ‘Skin communication’. Dr Pines concludes that women who suffered from infantile eczema may have experienced a fundamental disturbance in the mother-infant relationship and that these women unconsciously attempt to find, and long for, experiences in adult life where they are bodily soothed.
The next papers form a group exploring the issues of pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage and abortion, with an emphasis on the importance of identification. Two identifications are concentrated upon: as a pregnant woman identifies with her own mother, and therefore with the wish to become a mother to a baby, she also feels identified with the foetus, which naturally intensifies the universal infantile wish to be mothered aga