Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood*

Abstract

In this readable book Estela Welldon holds our attention by her clinical experience, deployed skilfully to demonstrate the creative views which she has developed from it. She shows her respect for the Freudian and Kleinian traditions, and her divergences from them, derived from her long treatments of perversions presenting in women. “Women can’t have perversions because they haven’t got a penis” is one of the shibboleths she accurately dismantles, and along with it, some of its lesser, but still Sacred, Cows. Welldon satisfactorily demythologizes several Sacred Cows; in fact the intention to do so is implicit in the book’s arresting title.

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