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“… I can't understand why she walk like a woman and talk like a man”
“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it's a mixed up, shook-up world, except for Lola…”
Within the past 100 years, many changes have taken place within psychoanalytic metatheory and clinical practice. Many contemporary psychoanalysts have abandoned claims of scientific accuracy and neutral objectivity informed by a unitary metapsychology. We currently have a kaleidoscope of narratives that highlight and emphasize relational themes, power/knowledge factors, discourse, context, and the coconstructed meanings of analyst and analysand. Intertwined in this major paradigmatic shift are alterations in how we think and talk about clinical practice as well as reconsiderations of gender, masculinity, and femininity.
Muriel Dimen has presented us with a scholarly, innovative, and exciting paper that traces the history of masculinity and femininity and gender within psychoanalytic discourses. Besides providing us with this clear and astute overview, she proposes new movements forward that are informed by postmodernist and feminist stances. Such a (re)direction of “gender talk” does not abandon the field of psychoanalytic inquiry and interpretations but redefines it. These proposals reveal the gaps in both analytic and feminist narratives and yet utilize these gaps and absences to create possibilities.