What I Heard in the Silence: Role Reversal, Trauma, and Creativity in the Lives of Women.: Maria V. Bergmann. Madison CT:  Int. Univ. Press, 2000.  238 pp.

The cover of this updated collection displays a sculpture entitled Three People on Four Benches, by George Segal. The vacant

place and the isolated postures of the people echo the hollowness of Bergmann's traumatized women patients. In a preface, Chasseguet-Smirgel describes most of these patients as borderline. Several were self-mutilating; several suffered from eating disorders. All feared abandonment, and were preoccupied with their relationships with their mothers. The absorbing case histories demonstrate the author's clinical sensitivity. Bergmann introduces her work with a glimpse of her own professional development, which was “unofficial” (p. 2) at a time when Freud was idealized, and when most psychoanalysts in the United States were male physicians. As clinical psychoanalysis has evolved, particularly in the realm of female psychosexual development, she has felt the need to revise her thinking.

The first of the four loosely connected sections discusses the struggle of women who have suffered the trauma of role reversal in early relationships with depressed and withdrawn mothers. The patients were each the oldest or only child. As adults, most were perceived as responsible women, and often as caregivers. As little girls, they had been considered precocious, having learned that their needy mothers were able to respond to being mothered. This mother-daughter role reversal helped the girl ward off feelings of abandonment. However, the reversal also had pathological implications for the girl's relationship with her father. A sexualized oedipal tie was prevalent, especially when the father participated in the nurturing. Later on, adult love relationships became suffused with idealizations and incestuous overtones; and both feminine and bisexual identities were stifled. Several patients remained unmarried, and came to analysis near or at the end of their childbearing years, although they consciously longed for marriage and children.

After highlighting the dynamics