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In proposing what she calls the “Third Step,” in feminist psychoanalytic theory, Muriel Dimen presented a thorough overview of the literature on the subject, while communicating her active, extensive, personal involvement. “Before we can understand how to help women,” she maintained, “we have to understand how we think about women.”
The “First Step” in feminist psychoanalytic theory, according to Dimen, involved Freud's pioneering attempt to question the definitions, roles, and differences between the sexes, and to propose a theory of female sexuality. Dimen noted that Horney, Clara Thompson, and others were later to challenge Freud's view of women as essentially “inferior beings.” This led to the evolution of the “Second Step,” which emerged in two directions: difference feminism and gender feminism. Difference feminism, according to Dimen, refers to the revaluing of traditional feminine attributes such as nurturance, empathy, and receptivity, while gender feminism embodies the study of the “dialectics of gender,” i.e., how males and females differ in their development, and how this system affects women's sense of autonomy. Acknowledging the contradictions between gender and difference feminism, Dimen incorporates this polarity as a means of furthering the development of feminist theory, thus creating the “Third Step,” in which she examines the complexities and ambiguities common to the varying experiences of individual women within their gender.
Dimen's criticism of difference feminism is that it reinforces stereotypical character traits in women, hence limiting our ideas of femininity. Instead, she proposes a modification of gender feminism, involving aspects of postmodern theory, demonstrating in a convincing argument how the idea of gender (as expressed through