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'Freud's Women' are the women of his immediate family, his female patients and his female colleagues. The colleagues had often been his patients and the patients who did not become psychoanalysts themselves were, it is the contention of this book, more colleagues in the discovery of psychoanalysis than they realised. Freud's Women also includes his intellectual daughters in the debates within psychoanalysis and beyond it about the psychology of women. The authors have collected biographical material about the first three of these groups of women and in the main part of the book they present, along with a brief personal history of each one, a fascinating account of the interaction each of them had with Freud. In the final quarter of the book the history of Freud's ideas about women's psychosexual development and the ensuing controversies are outlined and considered.
The balance between the biographical and the theoretical chapters raised some initial doubts. The personal histories of these women are very well told and extraordinarily interesting in the information they provide about what occurred before and after as well as during their contact with Freud. For instance, Dora and her father's mistress, Frau K, of the 'adorable white body', spent their mature years as teachers of contract bridge.
It was as if, across the years, they had finally dispensed with the superfluous men who had previously been their partners in their complex social games and contracts, yet they had retained their love of those games whose skill lies in the secret of mutual understanding of open yet coded communications within and across a foursome (p. 167).
Is, however, the fascination of such discoveries in danger of drawing the reader sometimes into too much voyeuristic interest in the lives of the famous at the expense of the significance of the ideas that have made them famous in the first place? Will one remember Marie Bonaparte for her repeated surgical attempts to have her genitals