Freud, The Birthing Body, and Modern Life

Balsam, Rosemary H.

doi:10.1177/0003065116686793

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(46 reference statements)

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“…He strongly claimed that Freud considered all feelings “irrational.” Freud’s aim in analysis, Rank argued, was to get rid of feelings, so that the person could be calm and rational, a good outcome of treatment. I do not agree with this reading of Freud, especially in his pre-1908 texts about women (Balsam 2017), or his work on anger or mourning, as well as love and loss. I see it as a matter of differing emphases.…”

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confidence: 80%

The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank

Balsam¹

2022

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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whose book I am reviewing here, is one of a handful of current leading scholars of Rank, and in chapter iii, "Otto Rank, Midwife of the Subject," he usefully lists other writers interested in Rank, with dates of their papers and summaries of their contributions.Kramer teaches leadership and transformative action at George Washington University and American University in Washington, D.C., and is a visiting professor at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. He has coedited, in a volume published in 2012, the two hundred fifty letters that passed between Freud and Rank from 1906 to 1925, documenting their close collaboration, their thinking, and their clashes (Lieberman and Kramer 2012). Also noteworthy is a 1996 book that makes Rank's rather tortuous writing and ideas accessible to the anglophone reader. Kramer now gives us this slender but intense, well-written, and fascinating book that is mostly about Rank's contributions, but additionally notes his influence on Carl Rogers's humanistic client-centered therapy and Rogers's turn to transcendence, especially at the end of his life. Kramer suggests Rogers and Rank as seminal hidden contributors to the relational trends that shape much of contemporary psychoanalysis. Rank has a stronger claim I believe, as he was steeped also in the field of psychoanalysis.Kramer alludes throughout his book to elements of Rank's history. Once preeminent as Freud's designated "heir" (following the 1913 ouster of Jung, the first "heir"), Rank is today mostly remembered as the first paid secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in its transition from

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confidence: 80%

The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank

Balsam¹

2022

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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“…Winnicott's work emphasizes mother's presence largely being at service of baby, as holding baby and providing a facilitating environment; as Bion's role for mother as container attends little to the quality of mother's own experience, her own mind and wider life. The psychoanalytic undertreatment of childbirth has been the subject of commentary (e.g., Balsam, 2013; Balsam, 2017; Chodorow, 2017). As Balsam (2013) argues, the subject of childbirth was a concern of a number of early psychoanalytic thinkers—Hilferding, Horney, and Rank, among them—but faded away as these contributions became framed as dissident.…”

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confidence: 99%

No space for mother's mind: A psychoanalytically oriented qualitative study of the experiences of women with a diagnosis of postnatal depression

Tyson

O’Connor

Sheehan

2020

Appl Psychoanal Studies

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Our understanding of postnatal depression (PND), and in particular the emotional world of mothers who experience this, and the relational processes involved remain today quite limited. Indeed, what has been called “PND,” likely as explored here a catch‐all term for a variety of composite states of mind, seems quite prevalent and likely too has a significant impact on both mother and baby, as well as on the wider figures and systems that are involved. This study used a psychoanalytically informed research method to access material that emerged around women's postnatal depressive experiences. Each of the six participants engaged in three interviews. The main themes that emerged were the following: (a) Starting on a bad note: difficult experiences in birth and breast‐feeding; (b) Support falling away: the absence of mother's support at key times in pregnancy and birth; (c) No space for mother's mind: the absence of space for processing experience in systems around women; and (d) Unwelcome familiar feelings: the contradictory responses evoked in motherhood. These themes are discussed in relation to their significance for our thinking about supports for mothers in the period prior to and following birth. Also discussed here is whether the technology of birth, important in safeguarding baby, may have reduced the space for mother's emotional well‐being in our systems of care.

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“…In addition to these losses, Freud was surrounded constantly by his mother’s pregnant body, which must have been a major source of apprehension to him, as Rosemary Balsam points out in “Freud, the Birthing Body, and Modern Life” (2017). Balsam highlights Freud’s unconscious anxiety about the female body, particularly, the pregnant body.…”

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confidence: 99%

Book Review: Mourning Freud

Berman¹

2019

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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The deliberate ambiguity in the title of Madelon Sprengnether's new book, Mourning Freud, alerts us to her double focus. Mourning Freud explores Freud's experiences and theories of mourning along with the ways in which the post-Freudian age has mourned one of the giants in the history of ideas. Neither a Freud idealizer nor a Freud basher, Sprengnether offers an intriguing discussion of one of the major areas of psychoanalytic theory-and a problem in life we will all encounter.Sprengnether is well qualified to undertake this ambitious project. A poet, memoirist, and literary critic, she is Regents Professor Emerita of English at the University of Minnesota. Sprengnether is a graduate of the New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic Thinking in Washington, DC, and a member of many regional and national psychoanalytic organizations. She also blogs for Psychology Today. Sprengnether's influential 1990 book, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, began her investigations of how and why Freud's theorizing of the oedipus complex obscured a deeper drama that he failed to consider: the preoedipal stage of human development. Freud's inability to theorize early development betrays his fear, in Sprengnether's view, of a spectral, haunting, and often threatening mother.Sprengnether begins her introduction, "Insight and Blindness," with an apt quote by the literary theorist Terry Eagleton: a "work's insights, as with all writing, are deeply related to its blindnesses: what it does not say, and how it does not say it, may be as important as what it articulates" (p. 1). The introduction's title may also be an allusion to Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight (1971), a classic of deconstruction. Sprengnether, well versed in psychoanalysis, deconstructionism, and feminism, brings to Freudian studies an uncommon knowledge of "high theory" and a notable capacity for close reading.

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Freud, The Birthing Body, and Modern Life

Cited by 9 publications

References 43 publications

The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank

The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank

No space for mother's mind: A psychoanalytically oriented qualitative study of the experiences of women with a diagnosis of postnatal depression

Book Review: Mourning Freud

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