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A review by jrc2011
Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted by Polly Young-Eisendrath
4.0
Written by self-described Jungian psychoanalyst & long time Zen Buddhist, this book has a very particular style at the outset. The author does a great job of using myths and fairy tales to illustrate the difference between being the "Object of Desire" and the "Subject" of one's own desires. She also uses case studies from her work and everything works pretty well for most of the book. I found the section about hot house mothering and the child to be most illuminating -- I wish I could find more literature that expands on the defective concept of hot house mothering.
I see how my mother was raised in that kind of environment post-WW2 and then a swing away from that allowed us to be largely "free range" children and latch key kids. A swing back toward that resulted in my sister staying at home to be a full time mother (no nanny, no nearby family) and subsequently rewriting our childhood as one of neglect and abuse. I hear mothers talking about "attached parenting" and "free range children" and I think that there is a bit of transition in the paradigm of parenting right now, so I might conduct some research among friends who are parents.
Her chapter on spirituality and religion seemed weak to me - I'm not convinced, for example, that I need to belong to a spiritual community in order to see my errors & flaws, and to grow as a human being and to find transcendent meaning in mortality. Her complaints about sexism and constraint in religion and women functioning as leaders in religious communities just sounded like some unrelated article or discourse tacked onto the end of the book to finish it off.
I see how my mother was raised in that kind of environment post-WW2 and then a swing away from that allowed us to be largely "free range" children and latch key kids. A swing back toward that resulted in my sister staying at home to be a full time mother (no nanny, no nearby family) and subsequently rewriting our childhood as one of neglect and abuse. I hear mothers talking about "attached parenting" and "free range children" and I think that there is a bit of transition in the paradigm of parenting right now, so I might conduct some research among friends who are parents.
Her chapter on spirituality and religion seemed weak to me - I'm not convinced, for example, that I need to belong to a spiritual community in order to see my errors & flaws, and to grow as a human being and to find transcendent meaning in mortality. Her complaints about sexism and constraint in religion and women functioning as leaders in religious communities just sounded like some unrelated article or discourse tacked onto the end of the book to finish it off.