Knowing Mothers Researching Maternal Identity Change

How do women experience the identity changes involved in becoming mothers for the first time? When this is the question of an empirical research project, it poses methodological challenges: how can research bring to light such experience, and how can identity change be documented, conceptualised and written about? Nineteen women's lives populate this book, as they become mothers for the first time, each unique and all having much in common amidst the diversity of East London. Through in depth case examples, Wendy Hollway demonstrates how a different research methodology, underpinned by a psychoanalytically informed epistemology, can transform our understanding of the early foundations of maternal identity.

Wendy Hollway is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at The Open University, UK. She has written extensively on empirical psycho-social methods using psychoanalytically informed interviewing and observation, as well as on mothering, care and subjectivity. The project on which this book is based was funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council, part of the Identities and Social Change programme.

PART I: A PSYCHO-SOCIAL RESEARCH PROJECT EXAMPLE: INTRODUCING PRINCIPLES, METHODS AND PRACTICES
1. Introduction: Knowing Mothers, Researching Becoming
2. Empirical Psycho-social Research: Design and Psychoanalytically Informed Principles
3. The Reality of Being a Young Girl: Agency, Imagination and Objectivity
PART II: THREE PSYCHO-SOCIAL PERSPECTIVES ON KNOWING AND BECOMING: PSYCHOANALYTICALLY INFORMED THEORISING IN MOTHERS' AND RESEARCHERS' KNOWING
4. Weird Beyond Words: The Transgressive Corporeality of Pregnancy and Com-passion Based Ethics
5. Psychoanalytically Informed Data Analysis
6. Scenic Writing and Scenic Understanding 
PART III: ANALYSING THE POLITICS OF THE MATERNAL PSYCHO-SOCIALLY
7. 'I'm Not the Mother Type': Gender Identity Upheaval
8. Theorising Maternal Becoming Psycho-socially
Conclusion
9. Unfinished Business