Introduction

The editors are initiating a new format in this journal, lying somewhere along a continuum from formal book review to roundtable discussion and debate. It will focus on a new and interesting publication in the area of gender and psychoanalysis and ask scholars from different disciplines and perspectives to react to the work in question: not review, react, in either broad range or narrow gauge focus. Then the authors will have an opportunity to respond to the reactions. A single book review can often seem like an act of foreclosure, a last word. This format is our commitment to the importance of asking questions about gender, keeping the narrative lines open, the story ongoing.

The first book selected is Harriet Wrye and Judith Welles' The Narration of Desire, published in 1994. This book, the work of two women analysts in a highly evolved subtle dialogue with each other and with their patients and readers, could be said to center on the paradoxical relationship between word and bodies. Wrye and Welles elaborate the powerful force of preoedipal body—psyche life on human character