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Anat Palgi-Hecker has embarked on a venture to portray the mother in psychoanalytic thinking from a feminist perspective. Her main thesis asserts a place for the mother's subjective experience. She claims that, although the mother has become increasingly important in developmental psychoanalytic theory and in understanding object relations in the last decades, the mother's own subjective existence has been left in the dark. Equipped with feminist cultural criticism and sensitivity, Palgi-Hecker rides the deep waters of the most classical psychoanalytic thinkers to look for the mother and try to understand her absence as a protagonist in most psychoanalytic accounts of the human experience.
This book emerged from the author's doctoral thesis for Haifa University, Israel, and enquires into an impressive body of psychoanalytic texts, the biographies of their authors and their relationships with other main figures of their time. The extensive and varied bibliography, thoroughly studied and discussed, shows the author's erudition and is an invaluable source for further study and research in this field.
Palgi-Hecker's research was not motivated by mere intellectual zest. Rather, she uses her feminist sensitivity to speak in a full, clear voice against the view that ignores the mother as a subject. The author's expedition goes beyond uncovering an unknown continent and is designed to emancipate the mother from the confinement of the paternal and patriarchal grip. Throughout her work she refrains from a neutral stance and asserts a strong, ethical commitment to the feminist position that strives to define the mother as an experiencing subject.
The feminist perspective on motherhood poses several intriguing questions:
Where is motherhood located between an essentialist view that emphasizes the biological capacity to bear a child and the constructivist view of the mother as a psycho-social construct?
To what extent is there an inherent psychoanalytic connection between female sexu