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This highly personal selection of analysts taking up feminist issues affords the reader a useful look at some of the issues that have concerned analysts trying to create a theory of female psychology that will allow us to deal appropriately with women patients in analysis. Hughes begins with a theoretician of female sexuality frequently cited by feminists as an apologist for Freud—Helene Deutsch. But rather than repudiating Deutsch, Hughes shows her work as a progression of ideas that attempt to take into account both Deutsch's own experience as a woman and her experiences as a physician, a psychiatrist, and a psychoanalyst. Hughes asserts that Deutsch's work was influenced by her involvement with problems experienced by women during her time in Boston. The social situation that made women's lives difficult formed the view of women's choices and therefore of their conflicts. While the dualities of passive-active, feminine-masculine, and heterosexual-homosexual reflected her heritage from Freud, Deutsch pointed to the dualities of nature-culture and species-individual as salient. Hughes reminds us that Deutsch's own contribution was to articulate and privilege the dualities of masochism-narcissism and motherliness-eroticism. In this regard, Deutsch speaks to the modern American woman. Have a baby or a career, how much time for home, how much for the office, does it hurt the child if the mother works at home? Does a woman lose credibility at work when she refuses to travel? Deutsch talked of balance between the masochism necessary for the conception, bearing, and rearing of children and the narcissism necessary to close the study door when the child wants more of mother and the song calls to be written. Or is it better to leave home for work so that the boundary is clear to the child? Such questions reduce to the duality of masochism-narcissism.
Deutsch was equally ruthless and clear-sighted in posing the conflict between motherliness and eroticism. The mother who find