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Stephen Frosh provides readers with the opportunity to re-examine their understanding of gender issues in psychoanalytic theory. His starting point is his discomfort both with the categories of difference which classical theory offers and with the limits which his masculine status imposes. The knowledge that men are responsible for most child abuse weighs heavily on him.
The argument is presented in six chapters. Although the writings of Klein are considered, Lacanian formulations and their reworkings by women, particularly French psychoanalysts, are examined in detail and afforded importance. In the first chapter Frosh asserts that masculine attributes are given precedence over feminine characteristics in psychoanalysis. He offers as evidence its therapeutic aim of expressing feelings in words, the goal of replacing irrationality with reason, and the significance of the Symbolic which is connected to the centrality of paternal law-giving.
In the second chapter Frosh confronts the pairing of the Imaginary with the mother and the Symbolic with the father and with patriarchy. If rationality is masculine, then the unconscious and its potential for disruptive activity is connected to femininity, but a femininity which is shared by women and men. It is the Imaginary and the regressive wish to return to perfect harmony and complete understanding with the mother which is disrupted by the intrusion of language, the Symbolic. The Kleinian assumption that the countertransference allows access to the inner world of the other is challenged from a Lacanian perspective using the Imaginary/Symbolic distinction. For Lacan, projection operates in the register of the Imaginary while introjection requires a developed understanding of the other; but it is this very symbolisation which limits knowledge of the ‘Other’. In addition, there is a tendency to elide ‘woman’ with the category of the ‘Other’ which, given the patriarchal resonances of the Symbolic, tends to marginalise femininity.