You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Over the last three decades a wealth of psychoanalytic publications have reassessed the concepts of feminine sexuality and, less so, male sexuality. Until very recently, however, the various psychoanalytic schools have pursued these topics in isolation from one another. The consequent lack of intellectual cross-fertilization is evidenced by the minimal overlap in the references cited in publications by the various groups in the first half of the 1990s. Of particular note in this regard are Friedman and Protter's chapter on gender and sexuality in the Handbook of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (1995); two issues of Psychoanalytic Dialogues devoted to the study of gender and sexuality in 1991 and 1995; and similar issues of Psychoanalytic Inquiry in 1991 and the Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis in 1995.
For more than two decades the Zeitgeist in psychoanalytically oriented feminist studies in the United States, particularly for theorists adopting a relational or object relations framework, has been shaped by Nancy Chodorow's classic The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). Chodorow's central thesis there is that mothers communicate to daughters how to be a woman, which means being a mother, a caretaker. Biology is deemphasized in favor of social communication, and the body is considered to be “constructed” rather than “given.” To redress the inferior social status of women, Chodorow and others have recommended that men take a much greater role in child-rearing. Clearly, full responsibility for child care profoundly affects women's prospects in spheres of life outside the home.
Chodorow's point—that women's lives are greatly restricted by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering—has undoubtedly influenced the development of contemporary psychoanalytic ideas about women. Perhaps as an unintended consequence, arising out of a laudable desire to get beyond stereotypes, these aspects of women's lives are all but