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Hope for the future … knowledge of the operation of the hormones.
It did seem to give a little bit more permission to feel sexy, attractive when you're pregnant.
In their foreword to Rosemary Balsam's Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis, Nancy Chodorow and Adrienne Harris write that “since Freud told us that anatomy is destiny, and that anatomy was, explicitly, the presence or absence of the penis, it has been hard for analysts to conceptualize gender and sexuality apart from this particular sexual difference. Correspondingly, many contributors to the psychoanalytic literature on women have been leery of making women's bodies, or any anatomical destiny, front and central” (p. xii).
In this book Balsam reintroduces women's bodies into psychoanalytic thinking, but in a manner more nuanced and scientific than we are accustomed to seeing. Balsam's groundbreaking work can allow those of us who engage with the study of gender and sexuality to expand on her labor (pun consciously not intended) and to integrate psychoanalytic ideas with contemporary findings from neuropsychology, endocrinology, and other disciplines. Balsam's work is in the tradition of Freud at his scientific best.
Balsam's volume consists of eleven chapters plus an introduction. Much of the material in most chapters has been presented and/or published elsewhere in various versions. Reading these chapters sequentially, however, allows both experienced analysts and students an opportunity to