I was born in Boston in 1959, the second of three children born within three years to a psychiatrist father and a housewife mother. The term housewife tends to conjure images of boredom in modern minds, but perhaps the most significant fact about my childhood was how much my mother enjoyed caring for us. My siblings and I benefited from her love of drama and creative spirit, spending hours learning the entire songbooks of the musicals of the day.

When our parents divorced in 1967, my mother went back to college, and eventually became a teacher. I shuttled back and forth between my homes in Arlington and Cambridge, and ultimately attended Harvard College, where I studied psychology and social relations and pursued a passion for the theater. While writing an honors thesis on the moral thinking of prostitutes, I realized that I was drawn to looking through a psychological lens at unorthodox subjects, a theme that has recurred in all my subsequent research. Working during college and afterwards variously as a dishwasher, waitress, housecleaner, receptionist, accounts payable clerk, research assistant, and freelance writer, I eventually decided to become a clinical psychologist and began attending UC Berkeley in 1985.

I married in 1991, gave birth to our first child in 1992 and finished my Ph.D. in 1993, when I began working part-time as a therapist for children and adults. I was licensed as a clinical psychologist in 1996, a month before our second child was born, and continued practice until mid-1998, when our third child was born. I pursued my scholarly work on the side, writing articles and book reviews on topics such as gender development, feminism, hysteria, and false memory syndrome. With the birth of our third child, I became increasingly curious about the practice of mothering itself, and decided to direct my intellectual energy toward understanding it better. Maternal Desire is the result.

Books by Daphne DeMarneffe

Maternal Desire

by Daphne DeMarneffe