A Way of Looking at Things: A Review of The Power of Feelings by Nancy Chodorow. New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1999.  329 pp.

NANCY CHODOROW is a distinct voice in psychoanalytic thinking. As a feminist, sociologist, and psychoanalytic theorist, she has in recent decades brought her searching mind and postmodernist sensibility to reconsider a range of issues where the social, cultural, and psychological intersect, including sexism, gender relations, and homophobia. In The Power of Feelings, she elaborates and revises her views on an array of intellectual and theoretical concerns.

The book, a scholarly and forcefully presented work of broad scope and complexity, is a contemporary “contribution to our understanding of individual subjectivity” (p. 1), rooted in psychoanalytic clinical concepts, with emphasis on the transference. Chodorow returns to the central theme of the relationship between psyche and culture, in theory, human experience, and in the clinical encounter. Opposed to simplistic, either-or conceptual approaches within academic and psychoanalytic thought that emphasize either external social and cultural determinants, or inner determinants exclusively, she advocates viewing psyche and culture as an intertwined and coconstructing process. In the mind, she asserts, the cultural and the personal are inextricable.

At the core of Chodorow's thesis, and at odds with contemporary contructivist trends, is her affirmation of the role unconscious psychological life plays in mediating the area “in-between” inner and outer reality, ego, and reality, the personal and the cultural. Her goal is to demonstrate the interpretative power of psychoanalytic discoveries, and clinical processes in particular, for an understanding of this interrelationship. She elaborates a theory of personal meaning, arguing for a view of emergent subjectivity actively shaped by both external (the sociocultural and historical) and internal (psychodynamic and psychobiographical) sources of experience (p. 2).

With her focus on the personally subjective, Chodorow articulates her own aesthetic sense of the analytic process a