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Nancy J. Chodorow is one of the few scholars and clinicians whose work has transformed both her academic discipline—sociology—and psychoanalysis. She remains at the top of the list of those who are responsible for the fruitful cross-fertilization of academic study and the talking cure. She has her roots in hybrid psychoanalytic traditions, combining the best of classical and contemporary approaches. Though she regards herself as a contrarian, I have never encountered another psychoanalytic theorist who is less contentious or defensive—which makes her writing a pleasure to read.
Born in New York City in 1944, Chodorow began her teaching career at Wellesley College in 1973 and a year later moved to UC Santa Cruz, where she taught until 1986. In the mid-1980s she began training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, thus beginning a second career as an analyst. She completed her university career at UC Berkeley, teaching until her retirement in 2005. But “retirement” is misleading, for she gave up her fulfilling life and work on the West Coast to return to the East Coast, where she continued her life's passion, combining psychoanalysis, sociology, and feminism. She is currently a part-time Lecturer in Psychiatry, Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
Chodorow's 1978 book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender—her barely revised 1974 dissertatiom at Brandeis—was groundbreaking. The book represented a new direction in psychoanalytic thinking. She carefully balanced a commitment to psychoanalysis with the need for reform. “Psychoanalytic theory remains the most