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Readers of Louise Kaplan's Female Perversions would no doubt find that stunning performance a hard act to follow, but follow it she has with an equally challenging, equally profound, and in many respects equally original work.
Grounded in the primary dialogues humans create to keep themselves in touch with their own often bewildering emotional selves as well as connected to others, the range of Dr. Kaplan's psychoanalytic vision is astonishing. It encompasses historical groups such as the Argentinian Las Madres de la Plaza (the so-called Crazy Mothers of the Plaza), who kept alive under great danger dialogues with their disappeared loved-ones; bereaved families; various members of the Freud family; Flaubert, along with his creative progeny Emma Bovary and her daughter Berthe; the magical realist Magritte; and Holocaust victims/survivors. Though psychodynamics draw all these disparate subjects together, they are more specifically bound by the vicissitudes of loss; and although every kind of loss bears specific meaning to those involved, Dr. Kaplan carefully delineates differences between loss of parent and parental loss of child. Throughout, it is the unwelcome but inevitable intrusion of loss, which in jeopardizing or rupturing the human dialogue between genders and across generations, nonetheless reveals and even enriches it.
These dialogues which arise in the maternal dyad and remain charged with the drive-derivatives of early wishes, powerful affects of love/hate, and elusive fantasies of grandiose/idealized contents, sustain conflicts and render them accessible through our capacity for relatedness. Of course, there is the key proviso that we not tune out the static but stay attuned to the inner tensions which threaten to foreclose the dialogues, sidetrack them, allow them to trail off. These dialogues express developmental processes as well as guide them; they construct exaggerated figures out of our limited and partial repertory based on needs not only for grati