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This book offers an original perspective on the study of the feminine, exploring Jungian models of gender in relation to Lacanian and post-Lacanian concepts. The editors and authors have thus undertaken a difficult and ambitious project in that both classical Jungian and Lacanian theory can be interpreted as denigratory in their attitude to women and to the feminine psyche, and would also seem to exist at almost opposite poles of the spectrum of analytic theory. This book immediately involves the reader in the challenging task of finding new insights that might succeed in integrating these disparate positions. The two co-editors, Tessa Adams and Andrea Duncan, each offer three chapters, and there are individual chapters by Shirley Wheeley (who sadly died shortly after completing her contribution), Marie Angelo, Margaret Clark and Joy Schaverien. The authors therefore provide a mix of clinical and academic approaches to their chosen field.
This book invites psychotherapists of all theoretical orientations who do not draw significantly on Lacanian ideas to reconsider that position. One crucial question that recurs to the reader throughout this book is whether he or she accepts the Lacanian thesis that the law of the father is enshrined in the ‘symbolic order’ - language itself. The centrality of a Lacanian model for all the authors of this book is exemplified and succinctly summarized in the chapter by Schaverien, who investigates the implications for women of Lacan's view that it is phallic qualities which initiate difference and that it is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function. Schaverien suggests that: