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Alma Bond's newest book, On Becoming a Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery, warm and insightful, part memoir and part case study, is an engaging and probing look at a neglected life cycle event. This book walks the fine line between personal reverie and public revelation. It incorporates the generosity and wisdom Bond has shown in almost 40 years of professional psychoanalytic practice with openness in sharing her personal experience of becoming a grandparent. Her book is generative for all those working in the fields of parenting, female psychology, and life cycle development, and for those looking for new ways to mine psychoanalytic insights.
Under the guise of scientific methodology, we are taught as analysts to keep our self-analysis outside the literature, except for the limited area of countertransference exploration. As a result, we rely on our analysands' discovery of the deeper and more passionate wishes and fears underlying the events of everyday life, or we hide the richness of our own self-analysis behind a constructed patient narrative. Bond breaks stride with these traditions and lines up with such psychoanalysts as Marion Milner and Margaret Little, who have offered their own well-analyzed personal thoughts as informed data contributions to the literature.
In contrast to the prolific literature on the impact of parents on their children, Bond's work looks at the impact of children on their parents' psychological development, and thus joins the developing literature on maternal subjectivity. Bond's original motivation for her book, written as a diary during her daughter's pregnancy, was to study familial conflict while recording the biology of birth. As she awaits the birth of her grandchild, she enters an unexpected developmental crisis, or to be more accurate, a developmental opportunity, which takes her and her readers through