Freudian Analysts/Feminist Issues. Judith M. Hughes. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1999.  222 pp.

In this brief study, Judith Hughes—historian, psychoanalyst, and feminist—sets out to elucidate the connections between Freudian and feminist theories about female sexual and gender identity. Fully aware of the tendency among feminists to dismiss most of the discussion of female sexuality by Freud and his intellectual descendants as naively focused on the male fantasy of “penis envy,” Hughes nonetheless sets out to explore not only the limitations of the traditional Freudian

approaches, but also the areas in which later Freudian analysts have expanded upon the Freudian foundations to develop theories more in keeping with women's perceptions of their own experience. In addition, Hughes promises to elucidate those psychoanalytic concepts which, she notes, have been incorporated into some popular feminist writings.

At first glance, the scheme of this book seems deceptively simple. Hughes constructs her chapters around a scientific, Darwinian “selection” model, which seems to build from relatively unenlightened views of female sexuality to Hughes' own, presumably more enlightened position. Thus, she begins with “retrogression” in terms of libido development, elaborated by Helene Deutsch (when the little girl gives up hope of possessing a penis and returns to an identification with the mother). Then she moves to “epigenesis,” as represented in the biologically based, evolutionary developmental approaches of Erik Erikson and his associate, the feminist Carol Gilligan. Next comes “sexual selection,” as exhibited in the work of Karen Horney (who, as Hughes points out, would probably not have characterized her own work in this way, but whose emphasis on the tensions at play both between the sexes and within each sex lends credence to Hughes' choice of this particular Darwinian model of sexual competition to explain Horney's theory). Hughes then considers “artificial selection,” in the more environmentally based theories of Robert J. Stoller (who studied “core gender identit