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A cursory consideration of the title of this book suggests a tour de force of Dr. Holmes's papers, which promises to reveal insights about the psychoanalysis of women—in itself an enticing aim—but the denotation of the title is in fact much richer and multi-leveled. The book is divided into two parts: “Women” and “Psychoanalysis”; and, even though the primary focus is different in each group of papers, overall Dr. Holmes manages to present throughout an intricate interweaving of developmental theory, clinical examples, and an autobiographical account of her own psychoanalytic coming of age—all the while exhibiting a solid grounding in Freudian theories and feminist criticisms, modern psychoanalytic and object relations approaches. She presents her own theories about the distinctive nature of female development and its place in analysis, providing plenty of examples from her extensive work with individuals and groups, as well as her own personal life experiences. All in all, this intertwining of theory and practice, memories and forward-looking plans, makes for an informative and enjoyable read.
In the book's preface, Dr. Holmes touches on the nature of psychoanalytic training and the qualitative research that it entails. She talks about how she encourages students to write on topics that arise out of (or somehow connect to) their own experience, just as Freud did, and she explains how her concomitant pregnancy and childbirth experience informed her
own training and research, and led her to concentrate on female development and distinctively feminine issues. She also points out the predominance of the repetition compulsion in human experience, and focuses on the importance of studying how this comes up and perhaps gets resolved through psychoanalysis, which, of course, is different for different individuals. At the end of the preface, Dr. Holmes looks ahead to the final chapter of the book, “The Analyst in Winter”, in which she very openly explores the phenomena of