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Book review · Red Sistémica
Backstage. Women in the middle of life
For six years, the Argentine psychologist Silvina Singer ran a Women’s Workshop, a space where women who had reached the middle of their lives could look at the road travelled and choose how to live what came next. Backstage tells the story of that workshop: how it came together, what kept it going, and what is at stake in it for a woman’s identity.
Backstage, the stage and the frame
The music begins to play. The lights come up and the curtain opens. The show begins its ending. For the performance is the last stage of a long process of elaboration.
Backstage is the departure and the arrival of that process, and it is also the road itself. It is the backstage, the stage and the frame within which a Workshop of, for and by women takes place.
This book tells how the Workshop came together, changed and was transformed as its participants and the times changed around it. But it also tells what brought it into being and kept it alive for so many years, so that these same questions remain current today, yesterday and tomorrow. It is an invitation to accompany the author in her search for herself and, along the way, to meet oneself: for that is what it is above all about, building a woman’s identity, establishing who we are and who we want to be. To find that out, we have to go back to our history, to our memories, to our backstage.
Who is Silvina Singer
With a degree in clinical psychology, she has worked throughout her career in clinical, academic and institutional settings, in both the public and the private sector. She specialised in family and couple therapy and in group therapy, as well as in questions touching on every aspect of women’s lives. She has contributed to the women’s magazines Mujer and Sophia. That interest led her to run groups for pregnant women and groups around family violence, and then to create the Women’s Workshop: a space where women in the middle of life could reflect on the road travelled and choose how to live the future. She ran that workshop and others without setting aside her own experience as a mother and as a woman in search of her own personal, professional and artistic fulfilment; her interventions in women’s groups have conveyed passion and creativity, on a solid theoretical and clinical footing.
The workshop, presented by its author
The Red Sistémica review reproduces the book’s preface; we give here its main lines, in condensed form.
Around the middle of life, Silvina Singer writes, women go through one of the most intense life crises. To the menopause is added the empty nest syndrome. The stage is a difficult one to approach: it stirs up anguish, anxieties, dreams and illusions. The projects that used to give life its meaning stop doing so, and the time has come to find others, which will accompany or determine the way of living from now on. It is a passage marked by the certainty of limits, by death, present in the parents and friends who are no longer there.
Her experience as a therapist has shown her that, if a woman has no project of her own when this moment of life arrives, she places all her expectations in her family — not only her children, but her partner too — and thereby holds them hostage to her moods. The situations that then arise in her daily life, outside, are the reflection of other scenes, internal and unresolved.
The book gathers six years of running the Women’s Workshop, a space where a group of women dared to find themselves again in order to embark on a new life project: to unfold their personal creativity so as to adapt to new situations, to leave the other members of the family free instead of keeping them captive, to move from pathological relationships to healthy ones, to come out of depression even without yet knowing towards what. The author’s intention is that her readers should find, in the accounts gathered and in the approach put to work, ways of approaching this stage: knowing how other women go through it makes it possible to consider what tools and capacities each woman has, which of them can be used now, which are still to be created, and with whom to join forces to build new life projects.
“The game of life”
Each chapter ends with a section of activities for reflection and inner work. Their aim: to look at oneself, to recognise oneself, to identify what can be changed and what cannot, to observe oneself in the past in order to recognise the traces left in the present, to find again the models that have marked us and to take up the suggestions for becoming ever more oneself. The author recommends approaching them with flexibility, in an attitude of play, so as to be able to see and work on the difficulties that may arise. She points out that some readers will work through the proposed themes on their own, but that outside help — a peer group, a therapist — may be needed to channel the most stirring material positively.
“The doors are open. Welcome to the backstage.”
Silvina Singer, preface to Backstage
This book review is an English translation of “BACKSTAGE de mujeres en la mitad de la vida”, published by Red Sistémica (first published in Red Sistémica). Translated and republished with the journal’s permission.
Read the original articleHow to cite this article
Singer, S. (2023). Backstage. Women in the middle of life (Complexe Systémique, Trans.). Complexe Systémique. https://app.complexe-systemique.com/en_GB/articles/backstage-women-in-the-middle-of-life (Original work published in 2023 in Red Sistémica; republished in 2023 by Red Sistémica, https://redsistemica.ar/2023/02/08/backstage-de-mujeres-en-la-mitad-de-la-vida/)
To go further
- The 4 types of crises to recognize in order to accompany them betterA framework for situating the midlife crisis that this workshop accompanies.
- The couple's life cycle: a clinical compass for navigating marital crisesThe children’s departure as a stage of the cycle, on the couple’s side.
- The family novel: when writing becomes a training tool for therapistsA neighbouring group setting, where revisiting one’s history becomes work on oneself.
Related training courses
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État des Lieux: a psychological approach to spaces
Replay of the “État des Lieux” conference (Paris, 16 October 2026): Ivy Daure, Maurizio Frisina, Viola Sallay and Gilbert Pregno on places as a clinical resource. In French.
Short course
The suicidal crisis in adolescents and young adults
Training: assessing and supporting the suicidal crisis in adolescents and young adults. Clinical landmarks and systemic tools. In French.
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