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Reading this book is a thrilling intellectual adventure at times, and at other times a frustrating, puzzling, even tedious experience. Perhaps
this is inevitable in a book that reports 19 interviews, with a variety of prominent women. The authors/interviewers are psychoanalytic feminists and literary critics. These interviews stem from the authors' mutual interest in exploring alternative ways to organize psychoanalytic data. They believe that women analysts in particular are engaged in this effort, which ideally will keep analysis evolving as an area of inquiry and avoids its being reduced to a doctrine to be defended. In addition, they observe women who have been energized by the women's movement turning to psychoanalysis to explain women's condition in society.
Thus, their interviewees include women clinicians who sought analytic training as a means of enhancing their skill in the healing arts, such as Enid Balint, Hanna Segal, and Marianne Eckardt; others whose personal analysis changed the way they used a previous discipline, such as Muriel Dimen (anthropology) and Jessica Benjamin (social theory); and those who combined literary or philosophical training with psychoanalytic training, as is more usual in France. The interviewers include several generations of women: Diana Trilling and Enid Balint are in their eighties, the others are middle aged except for Jessica Benjamin and Donna Basin who are young women with young children. The vocabulary changes with the generations, the questions become more trenchant and infused with feminist thinking, but the need for women to find their own voice and to recapture their intrinsic sense of agency remain central issues.
The interviews are not chronologically arranged. The first two, recorded in 1980, of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, are in the middle of the French section. The other interviews were completed between 1985 and 1987, most in one sitting, some in two. Most are transcribed in 12 to 18 pages, with a few s