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Psychoanalysis: Listening to Understand is a book with many facets. It has four separate introductions by friends and colleagues of Dr. Kramer Richards. It contains previously published peer-reviewed articles, and book and movie reviews authored by her dating from 1989 to 2012. A few of these articles and reviews were written with others—Lucille Spira and Arnold Richards. The book is divided into sections—Female Development, Perversions, Loneliness, Technique, and Films. The unifying spirit is Dr. Kramer Richards herself and her interests as a psychoanalyst.
Psychoanalysis: Listening to Understand is thus not an integrated text on the ideas of a respected psychoanalytic theorist in women's psychological development. It reads, rather, as an intellectual autobiography. The reader feels he or she is enjoying a fascinating few hours with a colleague, learning what she thinks and why. As a lover of intellectual autobiography and of memoir, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Consider this confidence: Dr. Kramer Richards tells us that she was an unusual young girl who loved sports and the exuberant pleasure of using her body, rarely playing with dolls. Her status in her family was unique because she was the first person in her immigrant family to be born in the United States and because she was thus a citizen, her parents, her grandparents, and her uncles and aunts were all assured of being able to stay in the United States. What a powerful position this is for a little girl! Similarly, Dr. Kramer Richards started out her career with an Ed.D. degree and wrote a number of books for children and adolescents about dealing with issues of growing up. These experiences—it seems to me—must have been excellent preparation for becoming an independent thinker in psychoanalysis, someone who knows Freud but does not obsess unduly about those of his ideas that have not stood the test of time, such as those about female development.
Dr. Kramer Richards is known for her interest in female psy