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Dr. Eva Lester was a modern psychoanalyst. She challenged the concept of the female as a castrated male and advanced the view that the female is aware of being feminine at an early age. Her approach was rational and was validated by child observation.
Lester's written contributions to psychoanalysis fall into two main categories: female psychosexual development and the influence of gender on boundary issues in the analytic relationship. I will use three of her papers to highlight her perspective on female psychosexual development: “On the Psychosexual Development of the Female Child” (1976), and with Notman: “Pregnancy, Developmental Crisis and Object Relations: Psychoanalytic Considerations” (1986) and “Pregnancy and Object Relations: Clinical Considerations” (1988). Lester contributed as well to the understanding of gender and boundaries in the analytic relationship with several publications: “The Female Analyst and the Erotized Transference” (1985), “Boundaries and Gender: Their Interplay in the Analytic Situation” (1993), and “Sappho of Lesbos: The Complexity of female sexuality” (2002). These six papers form the basis of my discussion of her psychoanalytic scholarship.
For many years preceding Lester's 1976 paper, the controversial issue of gender identity was being addressed in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud (1923, 1925) thought that children were not aware of their gender until age 2