Can conflicting emotions of love and hate for a child actually have a creative impact on mothering?

New, revised edition of this bold and exciting book.

More and more women confess uneasily to finding motherhood as much a source of pain as pleasure. Rozsika Parker presents a new understanding of maternal ambivalence, suggesting that the coexistence of love and hate can stimulate and sharpen a mother's awareness of what is going on between her and her child. Drawing on interviews, clinical material from her practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a range of literary sources, Torn in Two is original and accessible. With new readings of the work of Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby and others, this book offers invaluable - and often reassuring - insight into the conflicts confronting women at every stage of motherhood.