The intent of Lucy Holmes's book is “to enrich [psychoanalytic] theory about female development in a way that focuses on women, not on the ways they are different from men” (p. 6). While confirming the value of oedipal theory, including the concept of penis envy, for understanding and predicting behavior of girls and women, Holmes emphasizes the hegemony of Freud's phallocentric theory, up to the present day, and its limitations for a valid understanding of female psychosexual development. In the past thirty years, she says, feminist psychoanalysts, attempting to develop new theories to correct the “deficit model” of female development