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It is said that the problem with self-analysis is the protective blindness to the countertransference. But, in Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, Nancy Chodorow treats us to her self-analytic double vision: A retrospective view about how her contributions as a key feminist theorist developed, from her early writings in the 1970s until now, as well as a refreshing appraisal of reasons why she has revised some of her earlier formulations. Her essays brim with incisive, wry, and at times humorous insights, as well as changes of heart. She ascribes the latter mostly to the dual experiences of becoming a mother and entering psychoanalytic training. Chodorow argues against the dogmatic assumptions about gendered identity and sexual experience that have crept into past psychoanalytic theory and practice. She depicts multiple influences that shape complex, unique, and often conflicted layers of sexual meanings in relation to the subjective sense of self. The chapters, based on previously presented papers, address cultural, Relational, and developmental contributions to such individuality.
Chodorow also portrays how the mutability of sexual and gendered experience reflects its historical and relational context while the development of a viable sense of self is being formed. The challenge and/or celebration of integrating such disparate aspects of self have had nuanced literary dramatizations as well. For example, the spirited, cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando (Woolf, 1928) begins life as a young nobleman in 16th-century England and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to become a woman writer in the 1920s. Orlando transcends both age and gender to have it all, not without his/her share of both joys and distress in each gendered position, within its culture, in which she finds him-/herself. Orlando muses that: “For it was this