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This volume contains engaging interviews and revealing sessions with eight prominent contemporary French male psychoanalysis focusing on the topic of women and sexual difference. After writing Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States, Baruch and Serrano (1988) decided to explore how male analysts in France viewed women. The authors wished to learn whether phallocentric views of women still existed among the French psychoanalysts.
The analysts selected represented both traditional and more contemporary views of women, and were less empirical and more interested in mythology, literature, and poetry than their American counterparts. The myths of the femme fatale and the woman as enigma still persist among some analysts; younger analysts address men's envy of women and women's superior ability to connect in relationships.
The conversations were held between 1988 and 1994 with Gérard Pommier, Alain Didier-Weill, Patrick Guyomard, Fran$cCois Roustang, Serge Lebovici, Horacio Amigorena, René Major, Bela Grunberger, and the American analyst Otto Kernberg, who addresses French influences on his work.
Pommier redefines traditional terminology. Penis envy involves the woman's narcissistic love; castration becomes a symbolic and psychological separation; the resolution of the Oedipus complex leads the little girl to the father she cannot have. Pommier argues that feminine desire, which is marked by abandonment, provokes sadism in men, which arouses their desire. The Lacanian Didier-Weill elaborates on men's fear of women and unfortunately reduces women to pure myth and stereotype when he depicts them as a threat to men. Men can love only at a distance, and