You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dinora Pines, London, Routledge, 2010, £19.99 (paperback)
This book, consisting of a collection of papers written in the 1970s and 1980s, was first published by Virago in 1993, and it has now been re-published having been out of print for some years. Dinora Pines considers the major events in a woman's sexual life: adolescence, pregnancy and motherhood, abortion, miscarriage and infertility, the menopause and old age. She gives detailed clinical material from analytic work, which amply illustrates her view that bodily changes inherent in these events always evoke, usually in the form of a re-enactment, problematic elements of the individual's infantile emotional development. From her early work as a GP and dermatologist, Pines came to understand that the body expressed what could not be verbalized: ‘pain that was unbearable and unthinkable’ (p. 3). She observed that bodily expressions of unbearable feelings were more common in women than in men and that ‘a mature woman's body offered a means of avoiding thought and facing psychic conflict’ (p. 4). She also recognized the emotional importance for her women patients of talking to and being touched by a woman doctor. This particular perspective of women analysts treating women patients has been further explored in two books edited by Rosine Perelberg and Joan Raphael-Leff (1997 and 2008).
The first paper ‘Skin communication’ describes Pines' understanding of the women she treated when she worked as a dermatologist; experiences which prompted her to seek psychoanalytic training. She elaborates her view about the nature of the pre-verbal trauma of infantile eczema through material from the analysis of a woman with a history of infantile eczema who presented with severe depression, with suicidal and psychotic episodes. She conveys the emergence in the transference and counter-transference of the disturbed mother-infant relationship resulting from the skin condition; in particular, the narcissistic problems in which shame an