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The present volume of nine essays on gender and psychoanalysis is an outgrowth of a seminar developed between 1991 and 1992. The text aims to explore the relationships among psychoanalysis, feminism, and issues of gender, and to address these complex and conflictual theories from various perspectives. The book may be viewed as a rereading of Freud's sentence “When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female’” (p. x). The future of gender, write the editors, lies, in part, in transcending difference as fearful strangeness. Each essay tries to look toward a beyond of gender.
Wendy Harcourt, in “Feminism, Body, Self: Third-Generation Feminism,” argues from a theoretical and personal viewpoint that psychoanalysis and feminism may coexist despite the rhetoric of opposition. Psychoanalysis explores gender identity as it relates to the desire and power necessary for social change. Feminism and psychoanalysis expand our understanding of patriarchy and gender, and help us redefine women's interactions with their bodies, culture, and psyches. Psychoanalysis and feminism examine the same issues: “the respective role of mothers and fathers, redefining gender identity and the relation to the body, the construction of