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Rosemary Balsam's book, Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis, is a fascinating study of the field's struggle to find a proper place and meaning for the female body in talk therapy. Psychoanalysis began by reducing aspects of women's experiences to their procreative functions and missing part: Freud attributed women's passive natures to having wombs that patiently awaited impregnation, and women's ambitions reaching beyond child rearing to penis envy (Freud, 1933). Although his ideas about the female makeup were immediately challenged (e.g., Horney, 1924), it wasn't until the 1970s that women were freed from biological reductionism by thinkers like Nancy Chodorow (1978), who emphasized the societal pressures and restrictions molding women. Given this history, Balsam stands on tricky terrain as she calls analysts to pay greater attention to the ways female anatomy may contribute to psychological possibilities and pleasures for women, as well as to their problems.
Balsam wants to reground us in Freud's assertion of the ego as first and foremost a bodily ego (Freud, 1923). She argues that by not wanting to be defined by biology, some feminist thinkers have led us too far from the particulars of the female form. Currents of hormones and swelling curves do distinguish the female body, as well as the ability, fully functional or not, to carry and birth a child. Balsam wants us to understanding how these particulars contribute to women's psychic experiences and struggles.
As a clinician who primarily treats patients with eating disorder symptoms, I appreciate her call to delve more deeply and complexly into the bodily experiences of our female patients. In my practice, I see girls and women who struggle significantly with the changeable nature of their bodies and with the prospect of pregnancy. Theories encompassing culture, genetics, personality traits, and life events often leave us lacking in our attempt to understand what compels females especially to engage in the pathologic