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According to her book's dust cover, Charlotte Krause Prozan is both a member of the San Francisco Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and a longtime feminist activist. The goal of this volume, to which there is a clinically oriented sequel, is to review, critique, and integrate the psychoanalytic and feminist theories of female development and personality. This is a lofty but rather unrealistic goal, inasmuch as psychoanalysis and academic or political feminism occupy two utterly different realms of inquiry and discourse.
Prozan devotes much of this book to summarizing an enormous psychoanalytic literature on all aspects of female psychology and sexuality. She presents a huge amount of material in minidigest form, rather like a psychoanalytic Cliffs Notes (candidates take note). But, as in Cliffs Notes, there is breadth but little depth in her capsule summaries. In addition, a suspiciously high number of her extensive quotations are from secondary sources, a practice that produces a mind-numbing digest of digests. And unlike a well-edited writer of Cliff Notes, Prozan permits herself lengthy and idiosyncratic digressions.
There are other serious problems with this approach. Prozan summarizes the relevant ideas of early classical analysts, ego