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In this book Doris Bernstein's innovatory approach to gender development is carefully gathered together and annotated by two of her colleagues at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York and made available to an interntional audience. In a career cut short by a debilitating illness and spanning only three decades, Bernstein was a pioneer, professionally as well as intellectually. Her life offers a model both of a professional woman, who combined a career with a family, and of a psychoanalytic clinician, who struggled against the medical monopoly of psychoanalysis in the United States. She negotiated IPTAR's accreditation by the International Psychoanalytic Association as the first American non-medical institute.
The prime focus of Bernstein's theory is a re-analysis of gender development in terms of the specific experiences of growing up in a female or a male body. Her account is firmly rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis and employs the concepts of the dynamic unconscious and of infantile sexuality; but where her gender specific approach differs from that of Freud is in the treatment of female sexuality. While accepting Freud's insistence on the significance of anatomical differences between male and female, Bernstein offers a positive account of the little girl's development. She furnishes an alternative to Freud's narrative of a secondary development, a shift in aim and object, made necessary by the recognition of lack. Her account challenges the orthodox view of a unisex development in which the phallic principle accounts for psychic structuration and sexuality, implying female weakness and a masculine form to genitality.