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As a practicing Psychoanalyst, Dr. Ruth Lax has spent many years observing and writing about the psychology and development of women. In her book, Becoming and Being a Woman (Jason Aronson, 1997), Dr. Lax has collected and shaped many of her pioneering observations into an always engaging and well written, often touching and a sometimes wryly amusing account of the conflicts and resolutions faced by women over their lifecycle.
Her affiliation as a Training and Supervisory Analyst and faculty member of the New York Freudian Society has not deterred her from taking issue with many Freudian concepts and clinical practices nor from redefining with zest and originality what it means to be a woman.
Although she does not declare herself an interpersonalist, she appears to be a psychoanalyst who operates intuitively from a two-person model. Ever aware of her impact on her patients, she was the first psychoanalyst to explore, in the 1960s, the impact of her own pregnancy on her patients, both men and women. The effect of this work upon both her patients and the psychoanalytic community, coming as it did at a time when it was anathema for an analyst to draw attention to herself in this manner, should not be underestimated. At that time when many psychoanalysts, following Freud's dictates, considered their own countertransference reactions pathological, Dr. Lax used them, instead, to inform and to further her understanding of a patient's intrapsychic experience.
Never one to operate from Mount Olympus, as the one-person model may incline one to do, Dr. Lax always seemed to have had the interest and capacity to listen to and learn from her patients-to walk in their shoes. The first chapter, “Freud's View and the Changing Perspective on Femaleness and Feminity: What My Female Analysands Taught Me,” is indicative of this. In it she describes an analysis of a young woman, previously in treatment with an orthodox Freudian male analyst. While the analyst was in many ways helpful and ki