You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a privilege, and fun, to review Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis, a compilation of Rosemary Balsam's previously published papers. They have been combined with more recent clinical material and continuing commentary, helping to delineate this seminal work on women in the theoretical and clinical psychoanalytic mindset.
Balsam is among the foremost clinicians and theoretical thinkers who continue to confront and refine Freudian psychoanalytic thought about women: our bodies, our selves—in essence, the interactions between the insides and outsides of our lives. Balsam has the poet and the practitioner about her; and the lilt with which she proclaims her thinking, on the page and in person, gently assists her as she determinedly takes on the least gentle of psychoanalytic topics and history: that is, the profound misunderstanding and misuse of the female experience by most often misguided, even if well-intentioned, psychoanalytic pioneers and progeny—beginning, of course, with Freud.
Balsam's efforts to engage us in the study of girls and women, for nigh on forty years, began with an early paper about the pregnant therapist.1 At just about the same time, I was a pregnant therapist, not fully prepared for the intersection of my work and my body—or its impact on my patients. I remember being astonished that several patients did not notice my pregnant state until well into my third trimester. It was then that I began a long, complex education about the myriad meanings of the female body qua humankind. Balsam realized this needed to be written and spoken about beyond our offices in new and fundamental ways, and that first look many years ago heralded her body of work (an