families | ZETEO

MORANDI, RELATIONSHIPS, FASCISM, STILL LIFE

November 23, 2015 by William Eaton

Living with the objects, they became his family, his neighbors, his friends. — Janet Abramowicz, former assistant to Morandi You don’t have to paint a figure to express human feelings. — Robert Motherwell [1] (1) For what, in the past year, have been revealed to be psychological reasons, I have long been drawn to the still lifes of the twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, one of the great still-life painters, etchers, and watercolorists. There is a dominant interpretation […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: families, fascism, Italy, Morandi, painting, relationships, Still Life

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Divine Wisdom (and of course emotions)

April 2, 2015 by William Eaton

Love, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been translated (perhaps inaccurately) as saying, involves giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist. It might be more simply proposed that movies involve offering illusions to people who are in the dark. And the next step for a purist would be to propose that the best movies are those that concern, or at least touch on, this very fact. I read in the New York Times that the American-French […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: families, incest, isolation, Lacan, marriage, movies

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Parents look back and children do too

December 1, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Last morning, as I skimmed through my favorite books, I bumped into Marjorie Orellana’s Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture. I had not picked up the book since last year, but it was easy to remember why I like it so much. While speaking mostly about children’s work as translators for their monolingual parents, Orellana also dedicates a brief section to Immigrant Childhoods. She begins this section by explaining: Immigrant families differ from those who have resided in the United States for generations on dimensions […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: books, childhood, children, families, immigration, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Translating Childhoods

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I’m not allowed to be bored

June 2, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Managing children’s boredom Adam Phillips makes a good point about the way adults feel and manage children’s boredom. In On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays of the Unexamined Life (Harvard University Press, 1994), Phillips examines the underlying meaning of people’s preoccupation with boredom. “Is it not indeed revealing,” he asks “what the child’s boredom evokes in the adults?” What concerns us, he suggests, is children’s lack of concern: Heard as a demand, sometimes as an accusation of failure or disappointment, it is rarely agreed […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: Adam Phillips, boredom, childhood, children, families

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From economy to emotion: The changing value of children

May 12, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Jennifer A. Reich’s Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System is best know for its robust and compassionate analysis of child protection as a system. Yet in many ways, her book is also about the (ever-changing) value of parenting, families, childhood and childrearing. In just a few lines Reich, introduces the possibility that children’s value, once strictly economic, is now tied to emotional markers. She deconstructs current assumptions about family relationships to explain that: In the last one hundred years, children […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, families, family court, law, parenting