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The invitation to review “this slender volume,” Changing Notions of the Feminine: Confronting Psychoanalysts' Prejudices, the latest book in the Routledge series Psychoanalysis and Women, should really have come with a trigger warning. The seductive word “slender” suggested to me that the book would be a lovely, elegant, and perhaps even “easy” read. Hardly.
Writing can be a dangerous act of exposure but perhaps never more so than when the subject pertains to what women want and who women are. Staying close to the book's titular promise, the ten seasoned psychoanalytic contributors, hailing from Europe, North America, and Latin America, are careful to suggest that their particular experiences with female patients should not be taken as emblematic of the whole. But against the background of widespread societal change that has surrounded the concept of the feminine, the reflections that these analysts offer about changes they have noticed in themselves and in their female patients over a lifetime of practice can't help but point to changes in psychoanalysis—about gender and, more generally, about sexuality.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960), perhaps more than any other philosopher of the twentieth century, had a great deal to say about both truth and prejudice. Gadamer's particularly postmodern prejudice was that “truth” is not something that can be affirmed relative to a set of criteria but rather is an event or experience in which we find ourselves changed. In a comprehensive introduction, this collection's editor, Margarita Cereijido, tells us that the concept of prejudice alludes to a judgment that precedes experience—corresponding to Kant's a priori. By organizing and discriminating among “facts” we assess and understand the world. But Cereijido, like Gadamer, goes beyond enlightenment notions that considered prejudice an impediment to true knowledge. Gadamer revealed how prejudices are, hermeneutically speaking, not simply inescapable but fundamentally necessary to the on