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In this book Nancy Chodorow has compiled papers representing her current views on gender and sexuality which she has presented and/or published in a variety of settings and journals since 1999. This volume offers the reader a good sense of the thinking of a major American psychoanalytic theorist, including her impressions of major trends in the field and critiques of other contemporary theorists on gender and sexuality. The interesting, at times inventive, subjects of the chapters range from rethinking Melanie Klein on gender to homosexuality as a compromise formation. Chodorow's voice is always thoughtful, at times challenging and at other times circumspect. As the title of the book suggests, she tries to individualize and to re-evaluate her and others' earlier generalizations and theories about gender.
Chodorow lays out her journey in finding her way from social scientist to clinical psychoanalyst and from a deep appreciation of Freud and Klein and identification with Loewald's thinking to contemporary feminist theorizing on gender, which tends to be more comfortable in the relational psychoanalytic schools. In the first chapter she chronicles this personal trajectory in regard to psychoanalysis and women. She admits that she first approached psychoanalysis as an outsider but now feels at the center and still at times an outlier. She identifies herself as an American ego psychologist who also relies on Kleinian concepts. As she muses about her earlier writings, she says that her investigations always began with a question: how can we explain male dominance in society; how can we explain a woman's desires to mother and to become a mother. The reader will find that inquiring mind throughout these essays. She has always worked with disparate theories and disciplines while mindful of their internal contradictions and their contradictions with each other. She has tried to synthesize these pieces into an interdisciplinary template.
Let me begin out of sequence with Chodor