Motherhood in the Twenty-First Century edited by Alcira Mariam Alizade. A volume in the Psychoanalysis and Women Series for the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Published by  Karnac, London and New York 2006;  220 pp; £18.99 paperback.

This book is the fifth in a series that started in 2002 on psychoanalysis and women, and the fourth to have been edited by Alcira Mariam Alizade. Such an editorial pace may have taken its toll; there are some omissions and

repetitions in the texts and on occasion the papers seem to suffer from having been reduced from extended versions published elsewhere. That said, there is also much to commend it. The book comprises a collection of 16 essays by analysts from different parts of the world. The geographical, economic and social reach makes for diversity, not only in terms of thinking about motherhood, but also of ways of using theoretical constructs, and this is refreshing in itself. This is not a book to be read at one sitting. It takes time and attention to find the way into each contributor's idiom, but this book provides much food for thought and requires no specialist interest in perinatal psychology and psychopathology to appreciate its scope.

In her brief foreword, Alcira Mariam Alizade writes, ‘This book takes a fresh look at women in their maternal role - in order to highlight the hitherto unknown aspects to which social and cultural change have given rise’ (p. ix). For psychoanalysis the crucial question is the way in which social and cultural change, and scientific advance, are refracted through individual psychic structure and unconscious phantasy. But when she continues, ‘Not all twenty-first century mothers treat motherhood in accordance with the established model’ (p. ix), I was puzzled. One of the meanings of the ‘established’ model might be that up until quite recently it has taken the sexual act between a live and fertile man and woman to produce a baby. Now this is not necessarily the case. IVF, surrogacy, egg and sperm storage and donation, hormonal intervention and so on have extended what is possible for women, hetero- and homosexual couples, who seek motherhood. Joan Raphael-Leff writes, ‘Mothers (and fathers, too) are now freer to follow the