They don’t have to drive themselves so hard. On the contrary, she says, “I’m offering this as a comfort to mothers. Some publishers-and some reviewers-found Almond’s book too disturbing. But in her novel, she created a motherless monster who is, Almond ventures, an expression of her own profound fears about the act. “That mothers have mixed feelings about their children should come as no surprise to anybody, but it is amazing how much of a taboo the negative side of ambivalence carries in our culture.”Īlmond draws on stories from clinical practice and fiction to investigate the dark side-from a woman’s commonplace fear that she will love her child insufficiently to extremes that include a mother’s murder of a daughter in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and Andrea Yates’s real-life drowning of her five children.Īlmond contends that facing ambivalence, which she views as a mixture of loving and hateful feelings, can be constructive, “when it leads the mother to think creatively about her difficulties mothering and how they can be managed.” In real life, Shelley went on to happily raise a family of her own. one of the best examples of the phenomenon was my own late mother, Barbara Almond. Here’s an excerpt from Steve Almond’s interview with UC Press author Barbara Almond: Rumpus: There’s such a remarkable range of cultural touchstones in the book, everything from literary novels ( Beloved, The Tin Drum, The Fifth Child) to blockbuster movies ( Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby) to pop culture figures (Brooke Shields, the Octomom). The monster within: Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and a patients fears of. Inside, I found the man responsible for all this color, Sam McMillan. Almond suggests that all mothers - no matter how much they cherish their children - struggle with mixed feelings, especially when they spill their porridge on the computer. What we love, we can also lose,” Almond writes. Almond> The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. In 'The Monster Within' she integrates clinical cases and studies of fiction to illustrate the pervasiveness and painfulness of maternal ambivalence. ![]() In her book The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood, Almond explores “the conflicts between the child’s and the mother’s needs, both legitimate.” Complicating these conflicts is the fear that accompanies love. Maternal ambivalence is both universal and inevitable, says Almond, a psychoanalyst, training analyst, and instructor emeritus in psychiatry at Stanford. ’63, has written a new book about another aspect of motherhood: mothers’ feelings of anger and resentment. Poetry, paintings, and corporate America have long idealized the love of a mother for her child, from Kipling’s “Mother o’ Mine” to Mary Cassatt’s portraits and soft-focus Mother’s Day cards.
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