Daniel N. Stern - The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever
Here you can read online Daniel N. Stern - The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1998, publisher: Basic Books, genre: Children. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever
- Author:
- Publisher:Basic Books
- Genre:
- Year:1998
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
As you prepare to become a mother, you face an experience unlike any other in your life. Having a baby will redirect your preferences and pleasures and, most likely, will realign some of your values.As you undergo this unique psychological transformation, you will be guided by new hopes, fears, and priorities. In a most startling way, having a child will influence all of your closest relationships and redefine your role in your familys history. The charting of this remarkable, new realm is the subject of this compelling book.Renowned psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern has joined forces with pediatrician and child psychiatrist Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern and journalist Alison Freeland to paint a wonderfully evocative picture of the psychology of motherhood. At the heart of The Birth of a Mother is an arresting premise: Just as a baby develops physically in utero and after birth, so a mother is born psychologically in the many months that precede and follow the birth of her baby.The recognition of this inner transformation emerges from hundreds of interviews with new mothers and decades of clinical experience. Filled with revealing case studies and personal comments from women who have shared this experience, this book will serve as an invaluable sourcebook for new mothers, validating the often confusing emotions that accompany the development of this new identity. In addition to providing insight into the unique state of motherhood, the authors touch on related topics such as going back to work, fatherhood, adoption, and premature birth.During pregnancy, mothers-to-be talk about morning sickness and their changing bodies, and new mothers talk about their exhaustion, the benefits of nursing or bottle-feeding, and the dilemma of whether or when they should return to work. And yet, they can be strangely mute about the dramatic and often overwhelming changes going on in their inner lives. Finally, with The Birth of a Mother, these powerful feelings are eloquently put into words.
Daniel N. Stern: author's other books
Who wrote The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Ann Oakley
Yana Cortlund
Cherie Carter-Scott
Hollie de Cruz
Sheila Lintott
Seema Gupta
The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Table of Contents
ALSO BY DANIEL N. STERN, M.D.
The First Relationship (1977)
The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985)
Diary of a Baby (1989)
The Motherhood Constellation (1995)
The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985)
Diary of a Baby (1989)
The Motherhood Constellation (1995)
To Adrien and Alice
Acknowledgments
WE WISH, above all, to acknowledge the many mothers who in their normal daily actions have inspired us, pointed out unseen directions, uncovered so many things that we were not fully aware of, and who simply taught us. In a similar vein, I (D.S.) am deeply grateful to my coauthor Nadia, and to Alison, for putting every part that I wrote through the crucial test of their experience as mothers.
Gail Winston, our editor, has been encouraging, critical, patient, and impatient, each at the right time in the needed dose. Her help has been immeasurable.
Some of the research and the writing of this book has been made possible thanks to support from the Steven Ross family.
INTRODUCTION
The Motherhood Mindset
THIS BOOK is about the inner, often private experience of becoming a mother. In a sense, a mother has to be born psychologically much as her baby is born physically. What a woman gives birth to in her mind is not a new human being, but a new identity: the sense of being a mother. How does this identity emerge in each woman, and what does the process feel like? There are many books about the physiological and practical aspects of motherhood, but far less is written about the mental world where the new identity is formed. Becoming a mother is accomplished by the labor each woman performs on the landscape of her mind, labor resulting in a motherhood mindset, a deep and private realm of experience.
This motherhood mindset is not born at the moment the baby gives its first cry. The birth of a mother does not take place in one dramatic, defining moment, but gradually emerges from the cumulative work of the many months that precede and follow the actual birth of the baby.
What produces this motherhood mindset? How is it unique to each woman, yet shared by all mothers? What phases does it pass through? And how can you identify the passages of this remarkable new inner realm and learn to navigate its waters? That is the subject of this book.
We start at the beginning: Who exactly is a mother, and is she inherently different from other women? It may sound like a simple question, but in fact it strikes at the most basic assumptions held by the psychological and therapeutic communities.
As a psychiatrist, I have observed and treated parents and babies all my professional life. For almost thirty years, I researched the psychological development of infants, clinically observed the mother-infant relationship, and worked with mothers and babies whose relationships were disturbed. During most of that time, I considered a mother to be a woman with an added responsibility demanding new actions and reactions. True, she would have to develop a new repertoire of feelings and behaviors when she had a baby, but my conviction was that she would remain essentially the same woman she was before the baby was born.
Both male and female members of the psychological community have traditionally relied on accepted theories when working with mothers. Most psychological theories are based on general principles that apply to a broad spectrum of people and the ways their minds function. In the quest for general rules, psychotherapists have believed that all people have a basic psychic organization, or mindset, that explains their behavior. A persons mindset is thought to last a lifetime.
This mindset is what helps each one of us organize our mental lives. Our mindset determines what we consider most important, what we are most sensitive to, and what we notice in a given situation. It dictates what we find pleasant and exciting, frightening or boring. It affects the choices we make and our tendencies to act in one way instead of another. Our mindsets organize our mental lives to make us the coherent individuals we are.
Depending upon the orientation of a mental health professional, he or she will refer to an oedipal complex, or a secure or insecure personality, or a dependent or independent character, and use these theories to help a person understand his own mindset. No matter what theory is subscribed to, however, in none of them is motherhood viewed as anything but a slight variation on the already existing mindset. No one thought that a womans mental life could fundamentally change with the arrival of a baby.
I believed this for many years until my coauthor (who is also my wife) helped me realize that the traditional psychological models did not accommodate the influence of motherhood on a womans mindset. It was a simple realization, but it has profound implications for the mental health profession as well as for each woman entering the world of motherhood. In the course of becoming a mother, I realized, a woman develops a mindset fundamentally different from the one she held before, and enters a realm of experience not known to non-mothers. No matter what a womans previous motives, vulnerabilities, and emotional reactions, when she becomes a mother, she will, for a time, operate from an entirely new mindset. This motherhood mindset pushes her preexisting mental life aside and rushes forward to fill the center stage of her inner life, giving it a different makeup entirely.
For me, the uniqueness of the motherhood mindset was a revelation, but in many ways it now seems almost to be simple common sense. After all, as you prepare to become a mother, you are facing an experience unlike any other in your life. When you have a baby, it will determine for a certain period of time what you think about, what you fear or hope for, and what your fantasies will be. It will influence your feelings and actions, and even heighten your basic sensory and information-processing systems. Having a child will redirect your preferences and pleasures, and most likely will realign some of your values. In a most startling way, it will influence all of your previous relationships, and cause you to reevaluate your closest associations and redefine your role in your own familys history.
As a mother, you will of necessity give birth to the motherhood mindset that for a time will act like the North Star in orienting your path in life. This is not merely a reorganization of your mental life, but an entirely new organization that will exist alongside (and most probably influence) your previous one. And all of this will happen inside your mind, while outside, in your physical life, you are learning to handle an equally new set of tasks such as feeding, nurturing, playing with, putting to sleep, and beginning to love this new human being. No wonder the mothers inner landscape has been little explored and explained. Mothers scarcely have time to identify it themselves!
As a mother hearing this for the first time, you may ask, Is this mindset going to last my whole lifetime? In my experience as a clinician, I see that it does last throughout a mothers life, but it does not always occupy center stage. After the birth of a baby, the motherhood mindset will fill the life of your mind, immediately determining your thoughts and behavior. Your previous mental organization is simply pushed into the backgroundfor how long depends on the woman. It can dominate for several weeks, several months, or many years. Very often practical and financial realities such as the need to return to work play a large role in determining how long this mindset holds center stage.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever»
Look at similar books to The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Ann Oakley
Yana Cortlund
Cherie Carter-Scott
Hollie de Cruz
Sheila Lintott
Seema Gupta
Reviews about «The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever»
Discussion, reviews of the book The Birth Of A Mother: How The Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.