The Woman Patient, Vol. II: Carol C. Nadelson and Malkah T. Not-man,  Plenum Press, New York and London, 1982,  206 pp.

This book is not comparable to Volume I, which contained important information with regard to female reproductive experience, function and care. It is considerably smaller in size, perhaps owing to the timing of its appearance in 1982, when many of the divergences from early psychoanalytic concepts and attitudes toward reproductive care had already been stated.

I do not agree with a statement by Moss on page 16 about the components of mother-child interaction, in which the infant's behavior, sex, etc. elicit the maternal response. This view is quite popular today. But I believe, from my own observations and the thinking of Sullivan, that the personality characteristics of the mother, her readiness for childbearing, and the motivation for the pregnancy are more important determinants of the maternal response, to which the infant then responds, there being a kind of cybernetic interaction between the two, mediated by empathy — a kind of emotional contagion between mother and child described by Sullivan. This is not a popular item today, but I hold to the concept that if one must choose between which comes first, the chicken or the egg, it is the chicken. This also translates into Winnicott's view of the “good enough holding environment” — or its absence — as determinants of infant development; and also Sullivan's concepts of the “good nipple, bad nipple or wrong nipple.” In other words, the character structure of the mother determines her mothering behavior more than any other single factor.

Brief corrective mention is made of the development of breasts in girls, something completely overlooked in Freud's metapsychology; however, the great significance of breasts to women, and their changing significance in our time, are largely overlooked. Also, there is insufficient recognition of the sources of penis envy, and its corollary, penis worship, where the female child expresses fewer privileges within the home and considerably lower status than her brothers.

Erikson's devel