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This is the third volume by the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) which has been set up to explore sexuality, interactions, and relationships between men and women. It is quite an ambitious book in its scope and breadth, but at the same time quite uneven. It is not only a mixture of different approaches and styles, but also a mixture of different levels of discourse, so that to talk about it as a unified whole is difficult. In the Introduction Alcira Mariam Alizade writes:
This book is intended to be open-minded and free-ranging in spirit…. The contributors were selected on a basis that combined both chance and known professional skill, with the idea of theoretical pluralism uppermost in our minds, even though we realized that this would probably result in controversy. (Foreword, p. vii)
I think that it is not the theoretical pluralism or the controversy that is the problem, but exactly the different levels of discourse ranging from the professional, theoretical or clinical, psychoanalytic approach to the more polemical or simply journalistic one.
The book is mainly, but not exclusively, the product of North and South American writers, and seems to have a double agenda of an in-depth exploration on the one hand, and promoting political/social change in male-female relations on the other. It comprises 11 articles, some psychoanalytic, some psycho-socio-political, some social psychological and not all worth reading. Some articles attempt to tackle topical themes such as transsexual surgery and its psychological causes and consequences, the involvement of men in abortion, male impotence and men's current insecurity of identity, but often the treatment of these themes is sketchy and full of generalizations. On the whole I found the book quite uneven with some papers much more light-weight than others. There is no new material in terms of theories of masculine development but maybe what is new is that masculinity and its vicissitudes are viewed from so many diff