Bio:
Tracy Sidesinger, PsyD, is a psychoanalytic psychologist in private practice in New York City. She works with adult individuals and couples in an eclectic style influenced by her postgraduate training in both Jungian and Relational psychologies. Her writing focuses on feminism and spirituality, as well as collaboration between all psychologies of the unconscious in order to make the creative potential of the unconscious more accessible in contemporary culture. In her personal life, she is a divorced mother of three school-aged children, which provides a basis for many interesting research questions.
Abstract
Western culture has perpetuated a gender division that minimizes maternal subjectivity under patriarchal knowledge. This paper explores this division through personal and clinical encounters and posits the uniqueness of maternal knowledge through dissent. Specifically, the Maternal No is an acknowledgment of maternal subjectivity and limitation which refutes an expectation on mothers to be agreeable at a cost to themselves. Dissent, then, is a necessary basis of affirmative desire true to the subjectivity of mothers.
The Maternal No – Personal and Clinical Reflections on Necessary Maternal Limitations