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Already, in 1925, as Claudia Zanardi reminds us in her fascinating introduction, Freud was defending himself vigorously against feminist demands that women be recognised as ‘completely equal in position and worth’. Zanardi's twenty-three Essential Papers on women's psychology bear witness to seven decades of fruitful debate between psychoanalysts and feminists. Lucienne Serrano and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, editors of Women Analyze Women, visited consulting-rooms ranging in style from ‘palazzi to monastic cells’ to interview nineteen famous analysts and writers about the impact of gender on their professional lives. There is much overlap between the concerns of these two sets of editors including their choice of contributors. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Joyce McDougall, Luce Irigiray, Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, and feminist academics, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, all chat personally in Women Analyze Women about the theories they expound in their Essential Papers.
Zanardi chooses a wonderfully diverse mix of ‘classic’ analytic and feminist papers that focus around essential questions posed by Freud - on female penis envy, the wish for a child, lesbianism, masochism and super ego development. Yet, ironically, the most notable omission is of Freud's own provocative yet rich papers on female sexuality. He is, it appears, just too male-biased to include. This is fair enough except that the book revolves around disagreements and reinterpretations of his theories. I would have liked to have been able to turn back to what he himself said rather than having to rely on inevitably biased synopses.
It is also very striking that although the Essential Papers ostensibly include writings by British as well as French and US feminists, there is only one British feminist contributor - Juliet Mitchell. And she, we are told in the introduction, has not been particularly influential in the US. The only ‘classic’ British analytic papers are by Klein and by W