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Paola Mariotti points out in her introduction to this new book that psychoanalysis has paid much more attention to the importance of the mother–baby relationship from the perspective of the baby's mind and body than the mother's mind and body. This book is a step towards redressing the balance by gathering together 14 key texts on various aspects of maternality written almost entirely by women from a number of countries (the sole male author is Winnicott). Many of the chapters have been published elsewhere, but are given coherence as a collection by juxtaposition and by helpful introductory sections in which Mariotti suggests how we might construct a fuller picture of female sexuality, development across the life cycle, fertility, reproductive experiences and how they all interact in mothering.
She identifies three important organising ideas which cross-cut the papers: first, the origins and meaning of the wish to be a mother in the early history of the potential mother, indeed in the mother–baby interactions involving both body and mind; second, the centrality of identification with a maternal imago which connects mothers to their own mothers and is a conduit for the transmission of particular feelings (for example, shame and guilt) and third, the role of the oedipus complex in structuring the wish for a baby. All of the chapters are useful to clinicians, but when the reader navigates them with these ideas in mind they come together more powerfully, making me at least wake up to some implications that may have been in the back of my mind but certainly not so clearly at the forefront. For example, Mariotti, picking up on Rosemary Balsam's chapter, asks why is there so little written about the impact that the changing female body, especially the pregnant mother's body, has on the imagination of the child – what does it mean for the identificatory process in a girl that mother's tummy can become so swollen? I found myself thinking that in anorexia, the ‘fat’ tummy is h