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Using a historical, sociocultural perspective, Dana Crowley Jack explores women's experience with their aggression. Although a definition is not offered, the focus is on self-assertion, as well as on anger against self and other. Sixty women from differing socioeconomic backgrounds were interviewed in a manner described as one of listening to women's voices. It is on this manner of listening and the understanding that evolved from it that I would first like to focus.
The description is of listening in what was simultaneously both a focused and unfocused manner. It was the unfocused listening that led to the experiencing of each woman's pain, which was at times difficult for the interviewer to endure. The empathy, the pain, the identification, the need to distance, the countertransference, are all familiar. A large body of knowledge has evolved out of these phenomena, but the author has not availed herself of it. The technique, although familiar and potentially quite productive, is of limited value in this study, as the interviewer does not access psychoanalytic understanding.