Epilogue

How do these articles affect our understanding of the role of the gender of patient and analyst in psychoanalytic practice? As the Prologue to this collection has detailed, not only feminists but critics of psychoanalysis, largely from outside the main stream (Horney, 1926; Thompson, 1942; Mitchell, 1974; Chodorow, 1989), have often singled out the one-sidedness of psychoanalytic theorizing. In its praxis, as well as in its theory of psychic development, psychoanalysis has been phallocentric. The major traditional theorists about the course of development, about the analytic situation, and about the quality of human experience have assumed the male as the norm, and only later, if at all, derived what ought to be the experience of the female by extension, exception, or modification. Occasional “insiders” (Deutsch, 1944, 1945; Kestenberg, 1968; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1970; Schafer, 1974; Stoller, 1977, 1985; Bergman, 1982) have conceded the main points of criticism and have sought ways to accommodate them by revising various of the theories, altering some major dimensions and basic assumptions. One could say that this collection leaves the present unsatisfactory situation largely undisturbed. That is to say, it contains no single finding that would force a basic change in any central theory. But that would be a demanding standard to meet.

These thoughtful and well-selected papers will, however, require the serious reader to reconsider his or her own position with regard to several notions that have been passed on across generations and have, through repetition, attained the status of revealed truth, though with little in the way of empirical support and, interestingly, also with little apparent theoretical necessity. My last