Gender as Soft AssemblyGender as Soft Assembly weaves together insights from different disciplinary domains to open up new vistas of clinical understanding of what it means to inhabit, to perform, and to be, gendered. Opposing the traditional notion of development as the linear unfolding of predictable stages, Adrienne Harris argues that children become gendered in multiply configured contexts. And she proffers new developmental models to capture the fluid, constructed, and creative experiences of becoming and being gendered. According to Harris, these models, and the images to which they give rise, articulate not only with contemporary relational psychoanalysis but also with recent research into the origins of mentalization and symbolization. In urging us to think of gender as co-constructed in a variety of relational contexts, Harris enlarges her psychoanalytic sensibility with the insights of attachment theory, linguistics, queer theory, and feminist criticism. Nor is she inattentive to the impact of history and culture on gender meanings. Special consideration is given to chaos theory, which Harris positions at the cutting edge of developmental psychology and uses to generate new perspectives and new images for comprehending and working clinically with gender. |
From inside the book
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... perhaps a moment of safe , shared playful space in which something new can happen . A pa- tient carried as a precious memory the experience of being read to by her father . As he read the saga of Piglet and Pooh carried away on a ...
... perhaps early and repeated concen- trations of multiplicity . From a number of relational writers - Benjamin ( 1990 , 2002a ) , Bassin ( 2002 ) , Cooper ( 2003 ) , and Davies ( 2003a , b ) — and from Fogel ( 1998 ) , holding a more ...
... perhaps even now are underway . This communication works extremely well , I notice . I feel myself sinking into the thick , visceral fear that has visited and revisited in these past two years . He is apologetic , but I realize as I sit ...