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With delicacy and exquisite care, Nancy Chodorow conveys the psyche as mutually expressive of the reciprocal situation of the human being within the family and surroundings. In her hands, this modern task (actually enormously difficult to communicate in writing because of its multidimensionality) seems deceptively straightforward and lucid. One wonders how we could have split and disintegrated the mutual influences so markedly in past versions of psychoanalytic theory. Chodorow is ambitious and scholarly in her project, appreciating and arguing closely—tackling theoretically the very essence of the experience of being fully alive, meshing the power of feelings with the vitality and uniqueness of unconscious fantasy, and blending clinical and theoretical knowledge of psychoanalysis with her earlier commitments: feminist thought, sociology, and anthropology. She is continually campaigning for each discipline to open itself to be critiqued by and to learn from the others.
Her book is also an attempt to address the limitations of the postmodern celebration of theories of fragmentation and the nihilism of disintegrations of self as a way to combat pressures to unify, which now seem taken for granted by many in the academy. While cherishing the individual, Chodorow seeks ways to conceptualize a depth of human experience, a direction that she believes can better take the place of psychological generalizations and essentialisms.
Since the 1978 explosion of her Reproduction of Mothering on the sociological and feminist scene,1 Chodorow has built a body of work