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Female Experience: Three Generations of British Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women provides a rich trove of material, both theoretical and clinical, from authors affiliated with the Kleinian, Freudian, and Independent schools in Britain. The title, however, is somewhat misleading. There is no paper by Anna Freud or Melanie Klein or Hanna Segal here. Joan Riviere's famous “Womanliness as a Masquerade” is presented as the one older contribution. Considering the enormous impact that Riviere's piece has had on film criticism and gender studies as well as on psychoanalysis, that was a good choice, but I would have liked a few more touchstone essays. It is regrettable too that the highly gifted Juliet Mitchell, who provides a short foreword, isn't here represented by an essay of her own, since she has been so influential in bringing Lacan and other European voices to American analysts and feminists.
These reservations aside, the questions the contributors raise and the issues they treat are currently of great interest to women analysts working with women patients everywhere, and have to do with the impact of gender on the analytic relationship as well as on the countertransference. The book focuses on female sexuality, reproduction, and ties to the “primitive mother.” That is, it concentrates on those subjects formerly neglected by classical psychoanalysis. One is struck by all the vivid and compelling depiction of the female body, and its part in developmental stages (pregnancy and childbirth among them) in the experience of the women patients depicted here and, to some extent, in their analysts as well. Whereas formerly most analysts denied or minimized the importance of their gender in relation to the patient, this book considers it of great importance, particularly in reviving