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As is well known, Freud frequently missed the boat in his efforts to explicate female psychology. For several decades, brave, thoughtful, and mostly female analysts have been revising his misconceptions and blind spots. These women are smart, articulate, and sometimes even respectful of the early psychoanalytic efforts to understand feminine developmental pathways. Among these revisionists, no voice is more vibrant and intelligent than that of Rosemary Balsam. In the company of other creative observers, Balsam explores and maps the vastly variegated terrain of female development. This important book brings together updated versions of many of her articles and book chapters written from 1996 to the present on the subject.
Balsam is a training and supervising analyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis as well as the current coeditor of the book review section of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. As such, she possesses many years of clinical experience as well as a wide-ranging knowledge of traditional and contemporary psychoanalytic literature. Although she acknowledges the “contemporary ego psychological slant” to her thinking, she is mindful and appreciative of the advances made by those outside that perspective. She can, however, be critical of the direction taken by those thinkers who emphasize internalized object relations at the expense of attending to the impact of flesh and blood bodies both our own and our patients'. As Chodorow and Harris remind us in their foreword to the book, “there is always a physically and psychically embodied patient in relation to a physically and psychically embodied analyst, not only a mind in relation to another mind” (p. xii) meeting in the consulting room.
The central thesis of Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis is the neglect of the female body in all its physicality and procreative power in most psychoanalytic writing and theorizing past and present. Balsam pays homage to Freud and his ob