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The Psychodynamic Treatment of Women is an ambitious title for an ambitious book. Striving to be comprehensive, the authors have produced 500 pages of text containing seven chapters that cover historical perspectives, adolescence, self-esteem, careers/relationships/motherhood, reproductive functioning, abuse, and later life. In addition, there is a 60-page appendix, from “A to V,” which offers brief specifics on subjects that range from neurobiology to reproduction to trauma, and an 80-page bibliography.
The authors, Anne E. Bernstein, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia, and Sharyn A. Lenhart, Clinical Instructor of Psychiatry at Harvard, provide an impressive overview of the psychology and psychodynamic treatment of women through as many lenses as exist in the literature today. They rely primarily on psychiatric and psychoanalytic sources, but also draw heavily from sociology and, to a lesser degree, anthropology. Their perspective is richly informed by extensive clinical experience, their sensibilities as women psychiatrists, and their own research.
No psychodynamic understanding of women could be achieved without addressing the assumption that personal experience and