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, edited by Paola Mariotti, Hove, Routledge, 2012, 440 pp., £95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-68164-3, £26.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-68165-0
This is an important book, bringing together a diverse range of papers in the psychoanalytic tradition from around the world. The topic is what the editor, Paola Mariotti, terms ‘maternality’. It is an awkward term and yet I think a necessary one. The editor quotes the OED definition as ‘the quality or condition of being maternal’ and she uses it to describe states of body and mind relating to being a mother. It seems a pity that we have to invent a word like maternality when we have the lovely, traditional word, ‘motherliness’. But this word seems to have become so affectively coloured as to make it unusable in a ‘scientific’ context. Something to think about.
The book is divided into three sections – ‘Mothering in body and mind’, ‘Subfertility and reproductive technologies’, ‘When not all goes well’ – with 14 papers in all. The authors include old favourites from Selma Fraiberg, Dinora Pines and Donald Winnicott as well as more recent contributions. The editor has chosen to focus principally on the issues of conception and pregnancy and the early days of motherhood. Unsurprisingly, the relationship of mother and daughter is one of the central themes. The questions posed on the back cover convey a sense of what the book is about, ‘Why do women want to have babies?’ ‘How does one learn to be a mother?’ ‘Does having babies have anything to do with sex?’ The majority of the papers in the book are previously published in journals, as one would expect. However, a number are in lesser known journals and the majority I had never read before, so the editor has done a very good piece of research in finding and drawing them together. There are a couple of papers which I think are original and one of them, by Dana Birksted-Breen, is a really helpful addition to the literature, looking at ways in which pregnant woman can (and cannot) make