ABSTRACT
Estela takes this opportunity to tell the story of the book she wrote in 1988, entitled Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood, in which she offers a conceptualisation and explanation of perverse mothering. Some of her earlier reflections on this book and her journey since writing it are to be found in Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the Psychoanalytic Understanding of Perversions, Violence, and Criminality (2011) and Dancing with death, (British Journal of Psychotherapy Vol. 25, Number 2, May 2009).
