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Becoming and Being a Woman is a collection of papers written by Dr. Ruth Lax, published in psychoanalytic journals from the 60's to the 90's and now brought together in one volume that represents her years of thinking about femininity and gender issues. Dr. Lax places her work within the classical school of American psychoanalytic thinking, influenced by ego psychology and object relations theories, with a few nods toward feminist thinking. The reader she envisions is surely within that framework as well, since she shows little interest in contemporary psychoanalytic writing, which has challenged and veered away from the classical school.
Surprisingly, she also gives little recognition to feminist analytic writers who have furthered psychoanalytic theory regarding female development. It is the generation of women analysts from Homey to Deutsch to Jacobson who are cited in her work, not Chodorow or Benjamin or even McDougall. Many of these papers are over twenty years old, and because she has not updated them to include or even to consider many of the recent writers on women's development, the older papers do not stand up well. Nevertheless, she does offer a historical overview of challenges to Freudian positions as well as her own formulations on femininity that will be useful and interesting to those concerned with the psychoanalytic study of women.
The puzzling aspect of her book is the degree to which she challenges the neglect of social reality in Freudian thinking, especially the power of patriarcharal biases on women's development, implicitly and sometimes explicitly bringing in a social constructivist perspective, yet simultaneously perpetuating many of these stereotyped characterizations of women herself. Her treatment of penis envy illustrates this paradox. Although she briefly reviews critics of the notion that all women suffer from penis envy and that it is a powerful determinant in women's psychology, she continues to treat it as a given, merely asserting