The Monster Within

by Barbara Almond

""Psychoanalysis has always addressed the monster conflicts, fears, and those unacceptable feelings of anger, envy, and hatred with which we all grapple. Such feelings are particularly scary for mothers, and Dr. Barbara Almond, an experienced psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, shows us how and why this is so. "The Monster Within" presents richly nuanced and detailed cases that give the reader a sense of what these difficult feelings of ambivalence are, as they are experienced day to day, consciously and unconsciously. Her expertly presented material provides the lively underpinning of this compelling book."" Nancy J. Chodorow, author of "The Reproduction of Mothering" """The Monster Within" is a gripping book. Dr. Almond's fresh insights and perspectives regarding maternal ambivalence help us to become more comfortable with these feelings. This book is enormously useful to mothers, clinicians and anyone else interested in the psychology of motherhood."" Daphne de Marneffe, author of "Maternal On Children, Love, and the Inner Life" ""Barbara Almond's book is a wonderful new resource for helping mothers, especially new mothers, to tolerate that love between them and their children must be burdened by resentment. Her evocative clinical and literary stories make ambivalence a bit easier for mothers to bear. This is essential reading for mothers, in psychotherapy or not, for fathers, and for therapists, including male therapists who will become better able to see women's bodies and motherhood from a woman's perspective."" Stanley Coen, M.D., author of "Affect Intolerance in Patient and Analyst"

Genres: Nonfiction, Parenting, Psychology, Gender, Womens, Memoir

Kindle Edition

First published July 12, 2010

About the author

Dr. Barbara Almond was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She authored books on psychiatry, including The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood. With her husband Richard, also a psychiatrist, Almond wrote The Therapeutic Narrative, a book about psychiatric conditions in literary characters.

Reviews

[Gaijinmama · Rating 4 out of 5]

An uncomfortable read on many levels. Few mothers are willing to admit, even to themselves, that they have anything in common with Andrea Yates, Susan Smith or Dr. Frankenstein.
According to the author, many if not most of us could benefit from accepting that sometimes we fear, resent, even downright hate our children. Dr. Almond draws on her years as a clinical psychologist and brings in several examples from literature, film, and current news stories. At the very least, mothers do feel different levels of ambivalence toward our children and the role of mother, which society expects to be constant, saintly, unconditional love all the time. In admitting and facing these ambivalent feelings, we can heal ourselves and improve our family relationships.
Fair enough, say I. I remember when the Andrea Yates case happened I was in the throes of dealing with a toddler who wouldn't sleep and, while I was shocked like the rest of the world, I also thought "There but for the grace of whomever go I."
Most of us manage to get through those challenging moments, but any mom who hasn't felt at least for a moment like selling her kids on eBay or chucking them off the balcony, is either more saintly than I or she's in major denial.
Like all of us, this author has her biases. She blames Attachment Parenting (specifically co-sleeping, exclusive breastfeeding, and not using babysitters) for exacerbating the anger and hostility mothers may feel. She basically says, "when I was a child babies slept in their cribs and they turned out fine!" and
"what's wrong with giving a bottle now and then".
I'd have liked to see a fairer treatment of a variety of parenting philosophies, or at least more balanced research on her part.
Anyway, there is definitely plenty of food for thought here, though much of it is hard to swallow!

[D.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

For being only ten years old, this book is oddly dated. There was the suggestion that PC terminology doesn't help differently-abled people cope with their pain. There was the shock and pathologizing of women who choose not to have children. There was the insistence that a husband will have an affair post child because his wife isn't paying attention to him, rather than that his own behavior may her led to her diminished attraction. Lastly, there was referring to professional caretakers as 'somewhat infantilized adults' and the insistence that 'lower-class women' may be leaving their children in front of the TV or bribing them with sugar...

Also, the author concludes that we shouldn't judge mothers, all while having completed a book doing exactly that. A patient walks into another's office and naturally, this is taken to mean that she prefers the author's husband who's a stand-in for her own incestuous thoughts about her own father (?!?!). There was also a troubling breakdown of the experience of Andrea Yates, a woman who was schizophrenic and pushed to having more and more children by her husband, who also refused to help her with any of the children, and who insisted on her having even more - even as she was on trial for murdering all five of them. Somehow Almond only see's Yates' failing in an abusive marriage that ultimately became a horribly tragic scenario.

[Melissa Yael Winston · Rating 1 out of 5]

The apparent raison d'etre of this book is that mothers are not constantly gung-ho and unquestioningly loving of their children, but in our society, to admit to this ambivalence is tantamount to treason. It's not hard to see that motherhood is glorified, which is why I was drawn to the subject. But Almond decides to approach maternal ambivalence in two of the most infuriating ways imaginable. One, rather than take a critical look at cultural pressures regarding motherhood, she instead takes a navel-gazing approach by pseudo-analyzing various women's experiences, with far too little context involved. But the much-needed context would undermine the other infuriating characteristic of the book: the use of individual case studies and literary examples. Context would render the chapters discussing Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker irrelevant; they would also make the Rosemary's Baby discussion even harder on the ears than it already is. So Shelley had an ambivalent relationship toward motherhood, as did "Amanda," "Rachel," "Rebecca" and several other individual women. So what? Their experiences, likely altered for the sake of confidentiality, are hardly generalizable to anyone else.
From what I gather, Almond undertook a project to alleviate mothers' stress over not being perfect and not unconditionally loving their children 100 percent of the time. Instead, the book makes one worry even more both about becoming a mother and about what companies will actually publish these days.

[Robyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, I'm a sociologist and was expecting a sharper social analysis than what Almond provides, which made the self-helpy emphasis of the book all the more disappointing to me.

[Zen · Rating 2 out of 5]

So this was presented on NPR as a book about ambivalence in mothering... something that really interests my because I have PPD. However, as the title suggests, the author focuses more on the horrific and does a lot of allusion/comparison to Frankenstein's monster. I skimmed most of it because the whole Frankenstein bit just kept cropping up - to the point of monotony.

[Ashley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Frustrating psychoanalysis stuff. An annoying assumption that mothers may feel ambivalent but ultimately the right answer is always to birth children. It was like one long literary criticism essay for high school English class, except the author believed the things that they were writing.

[gee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book though I wish she would have talked more about how ambivalence applies generally to moms today rather than specific examples that felt like just that - specific examples . The examples of her patients felt unrelatable and I guess I started reading this book desperately hoping that I would find stuff I could relate to. I related most to the introduction and conclusion - all the stuff in between was interesting but didn't speak to me in the way I wanted it to.

A couple of things that irked me. One was an instance early in the book where she spoke about some mother who she met during a vacation when she was watching her grandkids. Her assessment was that this mother had ambivalence and it was reflecting in the daughter's behavior. In the same story, she also commented on how normal and happy her grandkids seemed in comparison. This totally put me off because it felt so unnecessarily judgmental. From then on it was hard for me to completely believe her theories.

The book was also poorly edited. Many typos and inconsistent capitalization. I hardly pay attention to this aspect while reading but even I noticed how many errors there were which means there were a lot.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted this to be so much more! It ended up being mostly about literary figures and examples of motherhood madness. I was hoping for some real life examples. So disappointing.

[ren]

Finally bit the bullet and marked this as 'read' after three years of having it on my 'currently reading' shelf. It was really interesting and I'd love to go back and properly finish it one day.

[Allison Dellion · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is for anyone who has struggled with the love/hate relationship that goes along with being a mother to children. If you have ever felt ambivalence toward your children, The Monster Within > is a good book to understand why that is and that it is normal to have these feelings as part of motherhood.

Even with that, I felt this book had a left a lot to be desired. For a large portion of the book, the author, Barbara Almond, talks about women who do not want to become mothers or did not try to become pregnant and had already decided that motherhood was not for them. She talked about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the monster offspring of Shelley's imagination. I could not personally relate to these sections and they took up a lot of the book.

[Caitlin]

I was excited to pick this one up, but after reading the intro I've slowed down. Something about Almond using fiction as part of her case studies to support her argument makes it feel much less believable. If it was advertised as a different type of book (literary study w/support of some psychological cases), I would have given it more weight. I ended up returning it to the library because I couldn't renew it anymore.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The intro/preface to this book is wonderful. However it gives away the entire premise of the book along with all the literary examples the author uses to validate her points. I was approximately 75% through with the book when I couldn't take another Frankenstein Reference. It was a very valid point, however exrtemely monotonous.

[nks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Highly interesting and with the noble goal of normalizing the ambivalent feelings about motherhood that almost every mother has.

The lower than "solid" (what a 3 is for me) rating comes from some heteronormative and other problematic vocabulary. You can feeling her trying to steer away from it, but the author appears to still have some blind spots in those regards.

[Diana]

I heard the author on NPR today. Sounds like an interesting book.

[Heather]

Heard the author on NPR and cried. So I bought the book on my kindle. Stay tuned...

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Difficult to read from a layman's perspective---I felt as thought I was reading someone's dissertation.

[Alexandra]

I thought that this was an interesting subject and one that is not properly discussed.
I read it very quickly and thought it was interesting and objective.