Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I was saddened and shocked to find that, when assigning my 2020 book, The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition, for review, the IJP North American Editor for Book Reviews seems to have looked only at my name, pigeonholed me as a woman who writes (or by implication, should write?) about women, and assigned my book to Paula Ellman, Chair of the IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis. I admire Paula’s work for COWAP and have been moved by her own writing, but to my knowledge, she has written on almost nothing that my book is about. When I was IJP North American Editor for Book Reviews, I tried to invite someone whose writings and areas of expertise and interest were germane to the book itself. I hoped that a reviewer could and would read from “inside” the book and its intellectual and substantive context, from the point of view of the author, in the way that we try to listen clinically. My letter addresses both the choice of reviewer and the review itself.

The subject of my book is not hidden but in plain sight. A quick glance at its title, subtitle, and table of contents indicates that I have written an interdisciplinary book about an American independent tradition, the links between psychoanalysis and sociology, the mapping of theory, Loewald, and Erikson. My opening chapter and a later “recapitulation” confirm that I myself have identified and named this tradition, that I have created the formulation intersubjective ego psychology to describe it, and that I am in dialogue with the British independent tradition. The book grows from my location in both psychoanalysis and sociology, and in the United States, at least, there are only a handful of us who have been both. In both fields (also as a psychoanalytic feminist), I have been a theorist (in sociology, as in psychoanalysis, a controversial choice: where’s the research? where’s the clinical example?).

Only one chapter displays any connection to women, gen