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The cover says it all: a Ghanaian woodcarving of a woman as bearer of a large phallus/ throne, with two erect child/guards at either side. The title of the sculpture is ‘Female Power’. The phallic mother, the riddle of sexuality for both sexes, is the fantasy that psychoanalysis seeks to reduce. The analytic reading is that she is an infantile identification on the part of both boy- and girl-children with the mother's omnipotence, the mother who has everything.
The book is a collection of the work of three generations of women analysts working within the British Psycho-Analytical Society with women patients. It is divided into three parts, the first dealing with the very early tie to the mother, the second with how such experiences are activated in the process of bearing children, and the third answers the vexed question of the relation of sex to gender, under the title of ‘Female experience in the psychoanalytic process’, the true focus of the book. Each section carries its own introduction. There is also a prologue which deals with the British Society and its debates, the psychotherapeutic relationship and, finally, what the book really seems to be about, gender and the analytic process.
The book suggests that when women analyse women the encounter is privileged by the biological sameness of same-sex bodies which may allow ‘an identification with a primitive maternal imago to explode more vividly in the transference’ (p. 24). In Women Analyze Women (Baruch & Serrano 1988), cited in this volume, the specificity of the female-to-female encounter is raised without making such a claim, arguing rather that in the long run the analyst's sex ‘probably does not make a difference in the transference’ (Joyce McDougall, in Baruch & Serrano 1988, p. 65). In She Speaks/ He Listens (Baruch & Serrano 1996), a later companion volume, the authors interrogate French male analysts about their experience with women patients and provide a general and typically French formulation of the