Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years: Helene Silverberg. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1998,  334 pp., $18.95. Toward a New Psychology of Gender: A Reader, edited by Mary M. Gergen and Sara N. Davis. London and New York:  Routledge, 1997,  626 pp., $27.95.

In a recent book by Philip Cushman entitled Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (1995), the author challenges theoretical assumptions in psychotherapy by utilizing a hermeneutical approach which places the story of psychotherapy within history and its larger cultural spaces, what he calls “terrain.” By shifting the parameters of the terrain to include a viable moral discourse rather than simply the dissemination of a covert ideology, Cushman's study invites us to become increasingly conscious of how social forces have directed the arrangements of power, ideology, privilege, and meaning. Hence, in an age when the historical concepts of psyche, self, mind, ego, and subject have become deconstructed and reconstituted according to culture-spheres of science, art, and religion, Helene Silverberg's collection of essays Gender and American Social Science adds to this spirit of reevaluation found in Cushman's work by returning us to both the origins and “terrain” of American social science during its formative years using gender as its analytical lens.