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Men tend to identify with Freud in the puzzlement he expressed when he raised his famous question “What do women want?” The Argentine psychoanalyst Leticia Glocer Fiorini goes a long way toward answering this question by applying what she calls the theory of complexity. In her approach, women do not want one thing. What a woman wants varies from woman to woman. This way of thinking strikes me as particularly useful in my clinical work, as I have frequently been aware of and puzzled by the variety of women's needs, wishes, and ambitions.
It is noteworthy that Glocer Fiorini practices psychoanalysis in a country where masculinity, in the form of “machismo,” is a fixed cultural value, undoubtedly the result of immigration from Southern European countries like Spain and Italy. Yet despite the influence of machismo in the culture, Argentine women have a reputation for being strong and independent people. Glocer's ability to examine unrecognized cultural categories and to submit them to psychoanalytic scrutiny testifies both to her sensitivity to cultural inheritance and to her independence of mind.
This book is quite short, consisting of an introduction and eleven brief chapters, but it is full of ideas that require slow and careful reading to assimilate. The author approaches the range of women's issues using