The Annual of Psychoanalysis: Vol.32: Psychoanalysis and Women

Psychoanalysis and Women, Volume 32 of The Annual of Psychoanalysis, is a stunning reprise on theoretical, developmental, and clinical issues that have engaged analysts from Freud on. It begins with clinical contributions by Joyce McDougall and Lynne Layton, two theorists at the forefront of clinical work with women, and moves on to original essays by theorists who have reshaped, and continue to reshape, our understanding of the developmental and psychological experiences of women. Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and Ethel Spector Person, from their respective vantage points, all engage the issue of passivity, which Freud tended to equate with femininity. Employing a self-psychological framework, Christine Kieffer returns to the Oedipus complex and sheds new light on the typically Pyrrhic oedipal victory of little girls. Section III broadens the historical context of contemporary theorizing about, and clinical approaches to, women by offering the personal reminiscences of Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Brenda Solomon, and Malkah Notman.A final section, dedicated to "women who shaped psychoanalysis," features historical essays on Ida Bauer (Freud's "Dora"), Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Edith Jacobson, and Therese Benedek, along with Linda Hopkins's revealing interview of Marion Milner. Of special note is Marian Tolpin's examination of three women - Bauer, Helene Deutsch, and Anna Freud - who helped shape Freud's notion of the "female castration complex," and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's exploration of how two women - Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham - developed parent-infant observation. Psychoanalysis and Women is an extraordinary chronicle of the distance traveled since Freud characterized women's sexual life as "the dark continent." Wrestling with the vicissitudes of early female development, with the way in which culture interpenetrates the psychological life of women, and with the roles of autonomy and relatedness in the psychological life of men and women alike, the contributors to this collection engage large questions with large consequences.They vitalize a half century of theory with the lessons of biography, and they broaden clinical sensibilities by drawing on recent developmental, gender-related, and social-psychological research. In so doing, they attest to the ongoing reconfiguration of Freud's dark continent and show the psychoanalytic psychology of women to be very much a revolution in progress.