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Psychoanalysis has been under attack by feminists for the past twenty years. This book, written by two women psychoanalysts from the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, is a further attempt to set the record straight in terms of what women are really like and how women are different from men. The authors explain that ‘the impetus for writing this book has occurred within the current sociocultural climate wherein increasing numbers of women are now seeking treatment by women’. Male therapists, at least as far as women patients are concerned, seem to be on the way out, especially in the United States. This context and the narrower one of the theoretical/political debates going on within American psychoanalysis have necessarily shaped the arguments presented in the book, and at times it seems that we are indeed on foreign soil. While this may be slightly interesting or irritating, depending on the reader's view, it is the abundant case material incorporated in the book and its analysis that brings us back on to common ground and provides the basis for a revision of Freudian theory as it pertains to women.
The importance given to the oedipal conflict as determining a woman's sexual identity and psychological development is questioned by the authors, who assert that ‘it is the relationship of the preoedipal daughter to her mother, which we feel shapes the future of the daughter's self-image, sexuality and oedipal complex’. From this starting point, the authors cover the following areas: ‘We explore the transference and countertransference implications of women treating women. Included here are issues of separation—individuation of the female child from her mother, the double loss of mother and the simultaneous recognition of the absence of a phallus, as well as the universal depression of young girls. In addition, we present a related discussion of the many fantasies that develop in women, like masturbatory fantasies and those of the illus