Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man's relationship to the question of 'woman' but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes.
This trans-disciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over twenty years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger.
Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensible tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.
Synopsis
The ideas that children have about science concepts have for the past decade been the subject of a wealth of international research. But while the area has been strong in terms of data, it has suffered from a lack of theory.
Children's Informal Ideas in Science addresses the question of whether children's ideas about science can be explained in a single theoretical framework. Twelve different approaches combine to tackle this central issue, each taking a deliberately critical standpoint. The contributors address such themes as values in research, the social construction of knowledge and the work of Piaget in a rich contribution to the debate without claiming finally to resolve it. The authors conclude with a discussion of how a theory can be built up, along with suggestions for ways ahead in the research.