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Women are no longer who they used to be. Women in the West no longer die in childbirth in the second or third decade of their lives. We also have fewer children, so that rather than spend almost all of our adult lives in pregnancy or lactation, we experience at most five or six years of that as against five or six decades of adulthood without childbearing. This profound change in biological reality has inevitably had consequences for psychic reality. And it has led to a massive effort to understand a new set of wishes, fears, and dreams in contemporary women.
Of the huge stack of new books on my groaning shelves, some are by psychoanalysts dealing with issues having to do with women, some by feminists about analytic theory and/or practice, and some by analytic feminists. I have selected nine for consideration in this essay. Some of the books were eliminated from consideration because of sloppy scholarship or concentration on issues that seemed to me not relevant for psychoanalysis. Others were excellent, but composed of chapters by so many different authors that to include them in this kind of overview would make it too choppy. The nine I chose seemed to me to have important things to say about the analysis of women, about how women's work and love lives affect their views of the world and of how female therapists may see a different world with different choices than do male therapists. All of these books are on the interface between intrapsychic and social issues. It seems that is the growing edge of analytic thinking about women right now.
I shall start with the earliest published of these books, one from 1988 which seems to me the most radical of all. In Mother, Madonna, Whore, Estella Welldon challenges a view of women that is at the basis of much of Western culture. She describes the dangers of mothering in terms of her clinical experience