The Birth Of Pleasure
A New Map of Love
-
- £8.99
-
- £8.99
Publisher Description
Love, like falling rain, can revive an arid life. But how can we find the love that brings true pleasure? How can we avoid the tragic love, with its lessons of sacrifice and loss, so deeply embedded in our culture? 'Pleasure is a sensation. It is written into our bodies; it is an experience of delight, of joy'In this inspiring book, Carol Gilligan sets out to create a radical new map of love. Although old patriarchal structures have been challenged the underlying patterns remain: the channeling of boys into 'masculinity'; the anxiety of girls in adolescence, the silences between men and women, the split between our social and our inner voice. In her work with children, adolescents and couples in crisis, Gilligan came to see how this 'double consciousness' - already present in the violence and betrayal of ancient myths, like that of Oedipus - had developed over thousands of years. Hunting for a counter myth, she discovered the story of Psyche and Cupid, a haunting tale of love and the searching soul, a model of resistance which she uses to frame her quest, showing how joy can be discovered in the heart of pain. The Birth of Pleasure rings with the voices of girls and boys, mothers and fathers, lovers and couples and echoes with telling readings of familiar writers, from Greek tragedy to Anne Frank, from Shakespeare to Proust, from Freud to Toni Morrison. All of us will find something that we recognise - and with luck, this brilliant, compassionate, flame-like book could really change our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Through her work counseling couples, and complemented by a detailed reading of some of Western civilization's major texts (e.g., Genesis, Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Proust, Freud and Anne Frank), psychologist Gilligan finds a relationship between the larger social order patriarchy and the problems individuals may have in forming loving relationships. According to Gilligan (In a Different Voice), the damage starts very young. At four and five years of age, boys learn to cut off some key relationships (e.g., with their mothers) to be more "masculine," resulting in a host of behavioral problems in grade school. Girls' troubles appear in adolescence, when they realize that being "good" means muting or censoring aspects of their personalities to maintain relationships with others. For children, conforming to patriarchal expectations produces trauma, the "shock to the psyche that leads to dissociation." Following the gender rules entails losses for both sexes, attests Gilligan, endangering adult relationships in the end. After a marriage's "honeymoon" phase, Gilligan says, the husband is often emotionally unavailable and the wife so adept at concealing her true feelings that she has to leave the marriage to rediscover who she is. For Gilligan, pleasure in these relationships is compromised by the awareness of what is not said. While the evidence Gilligan summons from her experiences co-leading couples counseling sessions sometimes seems forced, her observations of boys and teenaged girls may provoke new understandings of these troubled and troubling groups. Her mastery of literary sources and her intelligent but nonacademic writing style make this an enjoyable, challenging work.
