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This book is the product of the work of a group of Latin American psychoanalysts who have studied the extent to which social transformations and the advance of reproductive technologies have favoured the emergence of new family configurations, and the ways in which such configurations affect subjectivity. All the articles were presented at the Latin American Dialogue XI organized by the IPA’s Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP). The work is divided into eight broad sections, where readers will find significant contributions on the following topics: the maternal function; the various articulations among kinship, filiation and blood ties generated by the new modes of conception and gestation; childhood and adulthood identity issues tied to the presence of intersex physical features; perverted parenting; conflicts in the maternal function; and fragmentation of parental functions in new extended families. At the same time, the book is a tribute to Mariam Alizade, who was founding member of COWAP and inspired the Latin American Dialogue I (held in 1999), among many contributions. There is an article by Alizade in the first section of the book.
We are, thus, in the presence of a work that covers a broad range of topics with a pluralistic approach. The theoretical contributions, accompanied by ample clinical illustrations, foster reflection and, at the same time, challenge the current validity and limitations of some basic psychoanalytic concepts, or point to the need to expand or reformulate them. In this line, in the context of new family configurations, several authors address parenting in terms of the maternal and paternal functions, which may be performed by the biological mother or father, or by any other person.
Largely, the articles highlight the challenges these transformations pose to psychoanalysis. They argue that one of the risks we run is clinging to traditional psychoanalytic theory and pronouncing anything that does not fit into it as pathological s