Singing at the Top of Our Lungs: Women, Love, and CreativityFor most women, love and creative energy feel like the split ends of our psychic and emotional lives. When we focus on relationship, we feel uncomfortable about not accomplishing more. When we focus on our more self-expressive impulses, we feel guilty that we're not relating more. We end up seeing ourselves as divided, frantically trying to balance obligation with need, responsibility with satisfaction. In Singing at the Top of Our Lungs, Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan, internationally renowned family therapists and authors of Too Good for Her Own Good, reveal how real women can, and do, resolve this split. Based on original research with more than three hundred women, Bepko and Krestan identify and describe four dominant life patterns that women create in order to overcome the struggle between love and creativity: lovers - whose compelling and driving passion is for intimate, nurturing love, and relationship with others; artists - who are highly creative women capable of being completely single-minded about their work; leaders - who may be highly creative in their careers, but for whom relational contact is both the focus of their work and the context for it; and innovators - who find that creative self-expression is as much a necessity as relatedness, and are most inventive in blending their relational and mental lives. In this important, wise, and encouraging book, the authors help women determine if the life pattern they have chosen for themselves is truly fulfilling - a woman may be highly relational, or highly creative, or both, but the key is that she, not others, has defined the form of her life. She pursues a passion of her own; she sings at the top of her lungs. Ultimately, Singing at the Top of Our Lungs can help all women open up new worlds of possibility for themselves, with new appreciation for their own powerful potential. |
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Contents
A Passion of Her Own | 3 |
The Object of His Affection | 19 |
The Shadow of Her Smile | 44 |
Copyright | |
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Singing at the Top of Our Lungs: Women, Love, and Creativity Claudia Bepko,Jo-Ann Krestan No preview available - 1994 |
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alive Anne Morrow Lindbergh artist asked become Betty Carter career child choice codependency conflict connection create creative energy Creative women critical cultural defined dominant dream emotional experience Family Therapy fear feel female Feminism feminist focus focused Frances Sternhagen friends Georgeanne Georgia O'Keeffe High Creative High Relational husband ideas important Innovators integrative intense interviews involved Joan Judy Kenneth Gergen kids kind knew Leaders Lillian Hellman lives love and creativity love story Lovers Lucy Lippard male marriage married Mary Catherine Bateson means Monhegan Monica mother move never nurturing ourselves painting partner passion pattern person question relatedness relationship responses role Ruth Samantha Sara says self-expression sense sexual shape singing Smiling Woman social spiritual split image talent talk tell therapist things Tillie Olsen transformation Virginia Woolf vision wanted writing York