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Chodorow offers us a retrospective on her contributions to the American Independent tradition, yet not in terms of her ideas on gender and femininity. As her life has bridged two disciplines, psychoanalysis and sociology, these contributions focus on an area of psychoanalysis that is also an intermingling, on the place in between. Chodorow's impressive effort demonstrates her capacity to write in such a way as to integrate, to build bridges, rather than to polarize and divide. Over the course of her career Chodorow presented at a multitude of plenaries and lectures. In this book she assembles her past writings along with newer thinking. Most have been published at an earlier time.
Her preface is a discussion of her career, moving between sociology and psychoanalysis, and her interest in bringing individuality into sociology, and culture and society into psychoanalysis. She identifies a sociological trend in American psychoanalysis in the form of an “Independent American tradition”. Similar to the “Middle School” British Independent traditions synthesizing Klein and Anna Freud, Chodorow describes the American Independents as synthesizing ego psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis, and calls this “intersubjective ego psychology”, exemplified by Loewald and Erikson. It is clear that there have been specific individuals to whom Chodorow has felt close who have influenced her thinking in this area of “intersubjective ego psychology”, especially Poland and McLaughlin, and she offers us her perspective on these influential contributors.
Her first chapter, “The American Independent tradition” is the core of this book's theme, a historic-cultural study, as Chodorow brings her sociological lens to the development of the North American psychoanalytic tradition. Chodorow further defines the middle place, “the intersubjective ego psychologists”, the terrain between classical structural and contemporary ego psychology, and classical interpersonal and contemporary relational ps