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Psychoanalysis and Women, The Annual of Psychoanalysis from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, contains some exciting and historically interesting papers and contributions by some of the stellar theorists and clinicians in the field. The volume is divided into four sections with the first two comprised of clinical and theoretical papers on the psychology of women and the latter two including personal narratives and historical/biographical pieces about a few of the women who shaped psychoanalysis. In their introduction, the editors state that “no aspect of psychoanalytic theory has been, since the early years of the field, more problematical than the psychology of women” (p 1). Their effort is to represent the revolution that has taken place since the 1960s, when basic questions about the psychology of women began to be rethought from a woman's point of view (p 5). Despite the editors' aspirations, however, the questions that are addressed by this volume seem unusually narrow and, particularly in the theoretical section, the papers return us to an earlier “troubled and problematical” moment when the emphasis was on femininity, passivity and masochism in women.
Variations on the theme of femininity and passivity are presented by Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Christine Kieffer and Ethel Person. Benjamin continues her exciting work on complementarity focusing on the active-passive opposition as templates for masculine and feminine psychic life. Noting that femininity is partially constructed by the male psyche to contain excess tension and anxiety in the female body, she argues against women being passive containers and men being the active owners of erotic energy. Her thinking about the possibilities of “owning desire” and holding passivity as part of the surrender to a process of mutual recognition redeems “passivity” from the traumatic realm as well as from gender complementarity. Kristeva revisits and deconstructs fem