Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dana Birksted-Breen, at the time Editor of The New Library of Psychoanalysis, for offering me the opportunity to edit a book on this subject and for being an encouraging presence in the initial stages. I hope it will contribute to the ongoing (and long overdue) evaluation and reflection on the importance of maternality in the lives of women.

My thanks also to the present Editor, Alessandra Lemma, for her invaluable feedback and suggestions, and for having given such helpful and positive support. I am also immensely grateful to my friends for their encouragement and interest in this project, and to Susannah Taffler for her comments on early drafts of my Introduction.

I would like to mention the psychoanalysts who have contributed to this book. Some papers are classics, and their authors are long dead. But many are very much alive, and what a pleasure it has been to meet, in person or via email, so many intelligent, creative, interesting women. Rozsika Parker who died just before I had completed the book, was one such woman, both creative and kind, impressive and unaffected.

Finally, I wish to thank my husband David, my daughters and stepdaughters, who have put up in good humour with the very long gestation of this book.

The editor and publishers are grateful to the following for their permission to reproduce from copyright material as follows: