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With a diverse collection of voices and a polysemy of theoretical, socio-cultural, and political perspectives, this curated collection of articles from international psychoanalysts participating in the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of IPA (COWAP) tackles Freud’s enduring conundrum, “What do women want?” The contributors to the book make clear that this question itself is problematic from a number of perspectives. First, it frames women as the Other; second, it assumes universal wants and desires for women; and, third, it overlooks the complexity of how gender and sexuality along with culture and power differentials become imbricated in any one person’s desire and agency. The authors highlight the androcentric nature of Freud’s question, the who and when as well as the what, all of which are complicated and influenced by socio-cultural factors. The authors work to encourage analytic thinkers and practitioners to move from binaries and dualities about sexuality and gender to pluralities and complexities.
The book is divided into several sections and organized around different themes, allowing the reader to home in on what interests her, him, them; or it can be read from cover to cover as a compendium of different voices around ideas of femininity, desire, and agency. Margarita Cereijido’s introduction addresses important questions related to “what do women want today” by deconstructing the question and highlighting who is asking this question, what is a woman, and what are iterations of the feminine. She highlights the difference between “woman” and “feminine”, suggesting that each woman develops her own conception of what is feminine and that this is largely influenced by subjective social constructions. Also included in the introduction is an article by Virginia Ungar, who served as the first woman president of IPA, entitled “Authority, Power and Gender in Institutional Life”. This article traces the historical conundrum of women being silenced and denied the