Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the many colleagues and friends who have read and commented on this project over the past several years. Peter Homans read earlier versions of chapters 3, 4, and 5. Jay Geller read chapters 3 and 4. Mary Ellen Ross and Marcia Mim read the introduction. Don Capps and Judith Van Herik read the entire manuscript. Marilyn Edelstein read chapter 2. The Person, Culture, and Religion Group invited me to present part of chapter 1 at the meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Boston in 1999. I am grateful to these readers and listeners for their encouragement and critical feedback. I thank Santa Clara University for the sabbatical and research leave during the 1996–97 academic year and the spring quarter of 1999 that enabled me to write this book. The university also provided a Thomas Terry research grant which made it possible for me to hire three wonderful research assistants: Kathryn McNichols, Alicia Ross, and Charlotte Vallaeys. Vicky Gonzalez provided eYcient and thorough administrative assistance whenever called upon. I thank the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press for permission to revise and reprint “At Home in the Uncanny: Freudian Representations of Death, Mothers, and the Afterlife ,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996): 61–88. I ix thank the editors of Research in the Social ScientiWc Study of Religion for permission to revise and reprint “Legitimation of Hatred or Inversion into Love: Religion in Kristeva’s Re-Reading of Freud,” Research in the Social ScientiWc Study of Religion 10 (1999): 17–35. I thank Palgrave Imprints for permission to revise and reprint “Turning Away at the Navel of the Dream: Religion and the Body of the Mother at the Beginning and End of Interpretation,” from Dream Reader: Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreams and Dreaming, edited by Kelly Bulkeley, 2001. Many others have helped give birth to this project. The students in my courses on religion in the theories of Freud and Jung at Santa Clara University have asked the questions that led to many of the discoveries in these pages. I thank my editor at the University of California Press, Reed Malcolm, for his patience and encouragement. Finally, I am most grateful to my family: Amy, Clare, and David Pace have supported this project with good humor for many years in spite of the “maternal absences” that went into making the book a reality. x / Acknowledgments ...