Barbara Almond

Barbara Almond has practiced psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy for the past 38 years. She is also the mother of three grown children, one the writer, Steve Almond, author of "Candyfreak". With her husband, Dr. Richard Almond, she published "The Therapeutic Narrative: Fictional Relationships and the Process of Psychological Change" (Prager: 1996). In "The Monster Within" she integrates clinical cases and studies of fiction to illustrate the pervasiveness and painfulness of maternal ambivalence. Almond suggests that all mothers -- no matter how much they cherish their children -- struggle with mixed feelings, especially when they spill their porridge on the computer.

Almond's discussion of maternal ambivalence grows from her own experience and that of her patients. She describes a broad range of ambivalent feelings, beginning with fears of becoming pregnant, through anxieties about the baby inside during pregnancy, to the mixed feelings that child-rearing inevitably triggers.

Barbara Almond was one of five women in her medical school class at Yale. She became interested in maternal feelings and attitudes while interviewing new mothers for her graduation thesis, "Social Class Differences in Sources of Information on Infant Care".