Introduction

In recent years American Imago has made an active effort to solicit and include essays that deal with women's issues from a feminist perspective. This edition represents the culmination of those efforts as it is the first issue to focus solely on women and, as such, is an exciting event. I am especially happy that several of the essays in this volume emphasize race and class, issues which are of particular concern to many feminists. While the eclecticism of the essays reflects the diversity of approaches that both psychoanalytic and literary critics take to the psychoanalytic study of women, a number of the essays address the issue of female identity. In her essay, “One Slave Girl's Story,” Jennifer Fleischner states that “at the center of autobiography, lies some concept of self, involving some of the following questions: Where does the ‘self or ‘identity’ come from? What does it consist of? How is it constituted?” Several of the other authors take up these questions, but arrive at different answers based on theoretical perspectives which in some cases conflict with one another. This conflict often centers around different conceptualizations of the mother's role in the development of female identity—whether it be the lost and consequently longed for mother, the devouring mother, or the idealized, loving mother.

The layout of the issue reflects this eclecticism. It is framed by two theoretical essays which explore divergent perspectives. Both Elizabeth Young-Bruehl and Louise Kaplan agree that psychoanalysis as a field has been guilty of relying heavily on rigid male-female dichotomies that tend to denigrate qualities associated with women and both address the difficulties of developing theories that are women-centered, focusing on the ways that women imagine themselves outside of patriarchal value systems. However, the two writers show that women theorists approach this task in many different ways. One approach is taken by the object-relations theorists that