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.
Though in the last decades there has been a proliferation of biological, cultural, and psychological data about gender differences, this new information “is still not widely recognized, and its incorporation into the [psychoanalytic] literature is uneven and spotty” (p. 135), argue Malkah Notman and Carol C. Nadelson in Women and Men: New Perspectives on Gender Differences. To remedy this deficit, they have brought together in a slender volume of ten essays leading researchers in anthropology, sociology, endocrinology, neurophysiology, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, to report on the current status of the idea of gender differences in their respective disciplines. Their aim in doing so is to make easily available to clinicians “the background information to accurately assess the differences of opinion reflected in the available data” on gender differences. This is important for both practice and theory, for as new data has become available, they claim, “new concepts of normality and psychopathology have emerged” and “therapeutic goals have changed” (p. ix). Although hardy anyone now still upholds Freud's original theories on female development, it remains nevertheless correct, as Virginia