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Many practicing analysts share Nancy Chodorow's sociocultural history. We grew up in an era when heterosexual object choice was “normal”; penis envy, even in its shibboleth form, was central to analytic thinking; gender was one of two things, male or female; and sexuality was private and phallocentric.
Although sixty years later feminism has changed our culture, the general public is reading about parenting of gender-fluid children in settings that support full self-expression (Padawar 2012), and APsaA's Committee on Gender and Sexuality generates position papers on societal and clinical issues, there are analysts who still struggle with oversimplified thinking.
Chodorow's most recent book, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice, is an elegant antidote to any lag in one's appreciation of the complexity of the issues. The candor, intelligence, and creativity of the author models a probing scientific spirit and an appreciation for subtlety and individuality. The book is a tour through theory where the focus is gender and sexuality and the outcome is a compelling education in critical thinking. A founding feminist, a founding American relational thinker, a sociologist devoted to understanding the internal development of the individual as opposed to external social structures, and a classical-modernist psychoanalyst, Chodorow is all these things yet remains free of any particular school of thought. She charts her own course.
The book is a collection of essays written between 1971 and 2005 and viewed by her in 2011. She introduces each chapter/essay in a way that informs the reader of the original context and purpose of each essay (or invited talk), and she critiques and updates herself in elucidating,