Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Charlotte Krause Prozan,  Jacob Aronson, 1992

Charlotte Krause Prozan is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist of some thirty years experience, with an almost equal period of time of activism in the feminist movement of the San Francisco Bay area. This book is an attempt to place her understanding of psychoanalytic theory in a feminist perspective, and to give us some glimpses of what feminist practice might sound like, although these are limited in scope as a companion volume on clinical practice is promised. She also evaluates feminist political theory (Woolf, Friedan, Firestone et al.—Greer is curiously overlooked) and gives an overview of what this has to offer to enrich and enlarge the scope of psychoanalytic theory. At worst, this book reads like a theoretically unsophisticated extended book review, liberally interspersed with forthright personal views. At best, it is a thorough critique of much of the feminist literature, and a somewhat less thorough and slanted exposition of early Freudian, Deutschian, and Horneyian theory. She also takes stock of some more recent North American literature. At times, she is able to construct a thoughtful exposition of the intersections and light thrown on her version of the psychoanalytic by the feminist and vice versa. Feminist Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy might make useful reading for psychoanalytic psychotherapists of both sexes who may be unacquainted with feminist theory, although, even so, I would recommend some judicious skipping. For feminists who are already working as psychotherapists, the first chapter, and the chapters on sexuality and homosexuality