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The contributors to this volume of the Annual address Freud's theories on women through the varying disciplines of psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and political theory. The articles are grouped into four categories: Clinical, Theoretical, Personal Narratives, and Women Who Shaped Psychoanalysis. The editors conclude that the essential changes in thinking about women have been in the significance accorded relatedness rather than autonomy, in the attention given the vicissitudes of development (including but not privileging the oedipus complex), and in the emphasis on culture as a shaper of the female psyche. As the editors state, “Psychoanalytic psychology of women is richer and better developed… but… very much a work in progress”; this volume, they write, is “a contribution to that ongoing enterprise” (p. 5).
The first section, on clinical work, has essays by Joyce McDougall and Lynne Layton. McDougall's “The Psychoanalytic Voyage of a Breast Cancer Patient” describes her sensitive understanding, holding, and interpretive work with Sorel, a forty-year-old woman in the midst of treatment for breast cancer. In their work together, Sorel begins to understand that she has internalized a lethal mother introject and that her attacks upon her body, preceding her diagnosis, were ways to annihilate this unconsciously fantasized deathly intruder. It is not so much the cancer that brings Sorel to McDougall, for she has long ago resigned herself to death, but her terror of her loneliness in the sterile room she will be in for a bone marrow transplant. With McDougall, she begins to recognize the sterility of her childhood and her configuration of this loneliness into a somatic delusion of a black mass within.