Making Mothers Known: The Powerful Implications of Ellen Toronto’s Maternal Subjectivity: A Dissociated Self-State: Maternal Subjectivity: A Dissociated Self-State Maternal Subjectivity: A Dissociated Self-State by Ellen L. K. Toronto (2024),  Routledge, New York,  168 pages.

In Maternal Subjectivity: A Dissociated Self-State, Ellen L. K. Toronto traverses cultural history, psychoanalysis, and the material of her own life and work to examine the idea that maternal experience has been collectively dissociated. She compels us, as clinicians, to consider how this process may continue to go on within ourselves and may shape our patients’ internal structures and difficulties. Between the spaces of her collected papers emerges an idea of what maternal subjectivity is: its many labors, as well as losses, as well as pleasures, that nobody sees, and which largely go unsymbolized by mothers themselves. From a place of genuine curiosity and even empathy, Toronto helps make sense of our individual and systemic dissociation of mothers’ internal lives as separate from their mothering. She sheds light on how the conditions inherent to motherhood, particularly early motherhood, form a veritable “breeding ground for dissociation” (p. 134). Toronto writes from her perspective as a clinical psychologist, mother, and daughter, and her reflections and storytelling from within all three of these roles are candid and evocative. In this way she also demonstrates—directly and indirectly, through her own powerful maternal identity and voice—specific ways that patients, therapists, families, and society alike can be enriched and animated when these experiences are brought into shared awareness.

I read Maternal Subjectivity in a summer full of self-elected time with my own young children, the same summer that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie came out in theaters and the monologue delivered by America Ferrera on the impossibility

of being a woman seemed to be ringing in many people’s ears. With Toronto’s perspective in mind, I pause even now as I write on the word “self-elected.” It is true that I volunteered to take on the full-time care of our chil