Letter to the Editor

I would like to thank Dr Nancy Chodorow for her letter. I understand that Dr Chodorow is displeased with my choice of Dr Paula Ellman to review her book The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition in these pages and with Dr Ellman's review. However, I take issue with some of Dr Chodorow's claims and hope my addressing them will lead to her greater satisfaction.

First, while it is true that Dr Ellman is the current Chair of the IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis, she is not only that. Dr Ellman is also Faculty and a Training and Supervising Analyst at both the Contemporary Freudian Society and the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis (APsaA), and a long-serving member of the Board of the Journal. Thus, I take issue with Dr Chodorow's opening question that seems to suggest Dr Ellman is in some way not up to the task of reviewing her book and was selected only because of her expertise in the area of women and psychoanalysis. I believe it would do Dr Ellman a disservice to suggest that she is not enough familiar with the work of Loewald, Erikson, ego psychologists, intersubjectivists or Dr Chodorow herself to review her book, and myself a disservice to suggest that I “pigeonholed” the author by selecting Dr Ellman when she is in fact a strong theorist and writer in her own right, not only regarding women's issues.

Second, it has never been a requirement, as Dr Chodorow knows having herself served as North American Book Review Editor (NA BRE), that a reviewer for a book need to have published in the area of the book's subject; indeed creating such a requirement would greatly limit the number of potential reviewers of books. Finding an appropriate reviewer for an author such as Dr Chodorow, whose career has been both distinguished and long lasting, is challenging as one cannot simply ask the colleagues with whom she developed the American middle school approach since these are intimates with whom she has shared