![the monster within the hidden side of motherhood the monster within the hidden side of motherhood](https://www.cheatsheet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/How-I-Met-Your-Mother-1024x683.jpg)
#The monster within the hidden side of motherhood professional
She also draws on articles in professional reviews, as well as newspapers and popular magazines, and on pioneering feminist critiques by Nancy Chodorov, Adrienne Rich, and others from the 1960s and '70s.Īlmond's principal objective is to demonstrate the ubiquity and the multiple facets of maternal ambivalence and to suggest healthy ways for mothers and children to cope with their fraught relationship. Those fictional accounts illustrate many of the same themes Almond finds in her therapeutic work, and they enable her to expand and deepen her examination of the mother-child bond. In The Monster Within Almond uses two main kinds of evidence: clinical examples and case histories from her own and her colleagues' practices and discussions of selected literary works that she calls “case stories,” which range from the tragedy Medea by Euripides to Rosemary's Baby to Toni Morrison's Beloved. Andrea Yates, the Texas woman who in 2001 drowned all five of her young children, is one of the murderous mothers whose situation Almond analyzes in her presentation of the wide spectrum of “maternal ambivalent feelings, thoughts, and behaviors,” from normal jitters to psychotic states.
![the monster within the hidden side of motherhood the monster within the hidden side of motherhood](https://www.costumerealm.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/chr_0008-1024x512.png)
In The Monster Within, Almond asserts, “Today's expectations for good mothering have become so hard to live with, the standards so draconian, that maternal ambivalence has increased and at the same time become more unacceptable to society as a whole.” This increasing idealization of mothering has provoked both a revolt by some contemporary mothers against these ideals and a shocked fascination on the part of the American public with the most spectacular cases of bad mothering, in which women abuse or even kill their children. Psychiatrist, mother, and grandmother Barbara Almond's provocative new study makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about what she terms “the dark side of motherhood.” The negative feelings a mother inevitably has toward her child, however loving she may be, and the painful conflicts these feelings can engender, is a topic still too often taboo in American culture.