The Psychological Development of Girls and Women Rethinking change in time [Hardcover]

Choice Recommended Read

This thoroughly revised new edition updates Sheila Greene's original transformative account of the psychological development of girls and women and the central role of time in shaping human experience. Greene critically reviews traditional and contemporary theoretical approaches  ranging from orthodox psychoanalysis to relational and post-modern theories  and argues that even those that claim to focus on development have presented a view of women's lives as fixed and determined by their nature or their past. These theories, she believes, should be rejected because of their inherent lack of validity and their frequently oppressive implications for women.

Essential but often neglected insights from the more compelling developmental and feminist theories are woven together within a theoretical framework that emphasizes temporality, emergence and human agency. The result is a liberating theory of women's psychological development as constantly emerging and changing in time rather than as static and fixed by their nature, socio-cultural context and personal history.

Updated for a new generation of readers, The Psychological Development of Girls and Womenwill continue to be essential reading for students and researchers in the psychology of women, developmental psychology and women's studies.

1. Introduction: Building blocks for a critical analysis  2. Developmental psychology: New perspectives  3. Female development: Traditional approaches  4. Woman-centred developmental theories  5. Biology and the changing body  6. The making of the female self  7. Social change and social clocks  8. Thinking about time and the psychological development of girls and women

In this second edition, Greene (emer., Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) continues to challenge the orthodox Freudian devl#i