Motherhood in the Twenty-First Century

Mothers in the twenty-first century confront us, both in clinical practice and in theory, with fascinating challenges that to some extent subvert the traditional maternal ideal: the motherhood of single women, motherhood in which the mother-child relationship seems minimal (in the case of very busy working mothers), teenage motherhood in which there is no true awareness of the maternal function, motherhood in couples of homosexual women, men who take upon themselves the maternal function (men-mothers), complex motherhood by virtue of the multiple variants that have nowadays become possible thanks to new reproductive techniques, shared motherhood, surrogate motherhood, sublimated motherhood and perverse motherhood.

Mariam Alizade MD, is a psychiatrist and training analyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. She is the current overall chair of the IPA Committe on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) and former COWAP Latin-American co-chair. She is the author of a number of titles, including 'Motherhood in the Tweny-First Century'; editor of the IPA-COWAP series and of the collected papers of the COWAP Latin-American Intergenerational Dialogues.

Foreword -- Motherhood is unending -- The twenty-first century: what changes? -- Motherhood in a fertile new world -- Artificial pregnancy -- The non-maternal psychic space -- Why do you want to have a child? -- The place of motherhood in primary femininity -- Reconstructing Oedipus? Considerations of the psychosexual development of boys of lesbian parents -- Maternity and femininity: sharing and splitting in the mother-daughter relationship -- The parents, the baby, and the high-tech stork -- Motherhood and work -- The bodies of present-day maternity -- New reproductive realities: paradoxes, parameters, and maternal orientations -- Parenthood and HIV/AIDS. An investigation of the INPer based on psychoanalytic and gender theory -- New methods of conception and the practice of psychoanalysis -- The impossible being of the mother