Feminism and its Discontents: A Century of Struggle With Psychoanalysis: Mari Jo Buhle, Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1998,  448 pp., $38.95.

Mari Jo Buhle's book Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle With Psychoanalysis is something of a tour de force. It provides an encyclopedic overview of the manifold forms and routes that both feminism and psychoanalysis have taken in the 20th century, with attempts to link the two. It does not stop there but also considers the cultural and anthropological theories of Boas, Malinowski, and Mead, among others, as well as the political and social formulations of such thinkers as Adorno and Horkheimer. But as she states in this lucid and illuminating work, Buhle is particularly concerned with “the importance of the revisionist impulse to the trajectory of American psychoanalysis” (p. 10).1 For her, “neo-Freudianism is especially relevant because it evolved from the first conflict between feminist principles and Freudian tenets” (p. 10). Though some might object to the cause-and-effect hypothesis that is presented here, there is little else they will find wanting. Buhle is Harrison S. Kravis Professor of American Civilization and History at Brown University, and her approach avoids the extremes of ideology to which we have sometimes become accustomed. Buhle takes us on a journey with Freudians, neo-Freudians, post-Freudians, ego psychologists, object-relations and Kleinian theorists, self psychologists, and Lacanians in relation to