Changing Sexualities and Parental Functions in the Twenty-First Century

'The publication of this new volume in the Psychoanalysis and Women Series is very much a cause for celebration. It is an excellent collection that brings together a series of articles on topics currently discussed throughout the world, allowing an English-speaking audience to gain access to this intense, creative and vital debate. It is when dialogue not only implies "conversation" between colleagues, but also a crossing of geographic contexts in order to "listen" to how psychoanalysis is practised and thought of in different regions that we realise we are truly on a path towards the broadening of the horizons of psychoanalysis. This journey depends on initiatives such as the one born out of this book.'--Virginia Ungar, President-elect of the International Psychoanalytical Association'Bursting out of a carapace of classical and conventional psychoanalysis, this book captures a moment in time when colours shimmer before wings become airborne. Drawn from clinicians across Latin America, the book reflects the unique history and distinctive development of psychoanalytic thinking on this continent as well as current shifts in the social imaginary - altered power relations between men and women and new configurations of sexuality and family formation. Poignant case histories reveal traces of unrepresented social trauma, and the complexity of transgenerational ravages of loss, incest, violence and drugs amongst adolescent mothers, older parents and their infants, street children, infertile couples and gamete donors - all embedded in the diversity of age, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, "casta", urbanity and migratory experience across these different societies.'--Professor Joan Raphael-Leff, foundational Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) Chair; Leader of the Academic Faculty for Psychoanalytic Research, Anna Freud Centre, London'The diverse transformations separating sexuality from reproduction, conceiving children, and creating families in the twenty-first century affect the symbolic system so that psychoanalytic theories have to be reconsidered. This book illuminates groundbreaking work in rapidly changing sexual diversities and parental situations with outstanding psychoanalysts reflecting on new ways of loving, and raising families.'--Gertraud Schlesinger-Kipp, COWAP overall Chair'This book brings us closer to the wealth and strength of the thought of Latin American psychoanalysts from different geographies. The diversity of issues addressed by the book are very modern and interesting for contemporary psychoanalysis, just as transformations in parenting, sexual diversity and new ways of conceiving children through reproductive techniques. Crossing the borders of the language and entering into dialogue with different authors, it invites us to the challenge of rethinking theoretical concepts that were developed under the heterosexual nuclear family model of the last century, which are currently in revision. The different voices that run this book's pages put the reader in contact not only with theory but also find clinical material of great wealth. The topics revolve around maternal and paternal functions, neosexuality, intersex, neutral gender, child desire and reproductive techniques, transfer and countertransference, and new social contexts.'Patricia Alkolombre, Full member with training function, Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, and Coordinator of the Eleventh COWAP Latin American Dialogue on 'Parenthoods and Gender: Their influence on subjectivity', Buenos Aires, 2014