This book collects a series of papers, written over a twenty-year span, in which Dinora Pines draws on her considerable experience both as a psychoanalyst and as a physician and dermatologist to describe what she sees as the particular relations between mind and body in women. The observations that inform this collection center around the fact that women undergo a set of major experiences and transitions in life, including pregnancy and childbirth, that actively involve the body and that also afford them the opportunity to somatize and both avoid and express psychic pain in idiosyncratic ways. She observes that bodily expressions of unbearable feelings are more common in female patients in general, and goes on to develop the idea that “a mature woman's body offers her a means of avoiding conscious thought and facing psychic conflict” (p. 5). This becomes the leitmotif of this collection.

Pines is also clear in the way she defines her own therapeutic participation as a woman, outlining her stance early on as “a woman doctor