Mary Hamer – författare

In this major new book, Mary Hamer offers a new perspective on incest, making a link with the scandal of sexual abuse on the part of priests. She places sexual abuse in the context of the whole social order. Hamer's novel and innovative approach challenges the taboo on clear thinking around the subject of incest. She demonstrates the inherent contradictions in official accounts of the subject, from genetics and anthropology to law. Drawing on the work of American psychotherapist Judith Herman, she invites readers to focus on the neurological damage caused by traumatic experience, arguing that it is the overwhelming of one person by another that constitutes abuse, and it is this which causes the damage, not the fact of a close relationship. She brings together, in accessible form, key descriptions of the effects of abuse from analysts Sandor Ferenczi, Estela Welldon and Valerie Sinason She revisits the two real-life cases of Father Porter from Massachusetts and Sappho Durrell, daughter of the British writer Lawrence Durrell. She also draws on the work of artists and filmmakers to explain the way film and literature have helped to preserve our understanding of abuse and of its place in the world Films and novels featured: Murmur of the Heart, Art for Teachers of Children, Suddenly Last Summer, Through a Glass Darkly, Lolita, The Bluest Eye, The God of Small Things. Includes 16 film stills

In Julius Caesar Shakespeare links the problem of treachery between Roman men with the institution of marriage, and with men’s dissociation from women. He asked his first audience to recognise in the Rome that he represents features of the England in which they were living themselves: a state ruled by fear where the connection between keeping control over religious observance and maintaining the authority of the government was evident to all. This new reading offers an account of the historical figure of Caesar and of the Roman tradition that he has come to represent, while throwing Shakespeare’s own scepticism about the heritage of Rome into relief. Approaches drawn from object relations theory and from cultural history are combined with a sense of the work in performance to develop a detailed close reading of the language and of the interactions of the play.

Cleopatra has been dead for twenty centuries, but her name still resonates in the west. Her story has the status of a foundation myth. As such, artists of all periods have drawn on it in order to raise questions concerned with the world in which they found themselves living.This study chooses a number of key occasions from European history on which writers and painters re-imagined Cleopatra. In doing so Mary Hamer takes the reader on a pleasurable intellectual treasure hunt through the ages. In addition, by restoring these works to their original context – political, philosophical and aesthetic – the author opens up unexpected new readings of images and texts which had previously appeared to be self-explanatory.The purpose of this book is to raise questions about how these images of a dead Egyptian queen were read. Through careful analysis Hamer traces attempts to manipulate attitudes to women and power, women and sexuality and to desire itself. In the case of Tiepolo’s Cleopatra, for example, the Queen embodies the desire for knowledge; in post-Revolutionary France, she symbolises political freedom. In the new introductory essay we discover that Cleopatra’s role as a focus for cultural debate continues, and that, as previously, much is at stake: it is now the question of her race that is highly contested.