Reply to Commentaries: Fluffy on the Inside

The chance to think through what is happening with Western teenage girls with thoughtful colleagues from allied fields is rare. Despite the fact that psychoanalysis studies the individual in time and in place and knows full well that behavior and the intrapsychic are not constants but derive from the social conditions that shape our notions of mind, of the infant, of parenting, of what relationship is, of what constitutes masculinity and femininity, there prevails, both within and without psychoanalysis, the fiction that psychic structure is enduring and unchanging. Freud made this claim in his attempt to situate psychoanalysis as a science of the human being from Moses to the Greeks to the Victorian bourgeois who peopled his practice.

Freud's claim of ahistoricity has had both useful and limiting effects. It has encouraged those outside of the field to employ psychoanalysis as a method of inquiry for the more incomprehensible of historical, economic, anthropological, and sociological phenomena that defy a rationalist explanation asserting that there is an unconscious story which can be known.

The Reichian tradition of psychoanalytic clinicians demonstrating how character structure fits the economic and social exigencies of capitalism has continued in the work of many analysts. But despite some brilliant work by Marie Langer, Erich Fromm, and Franz Fanon, much clinical psychoanalysis has suffered by shunning an open dialogue with colleagues from its natural intellectual partners

within the social sciences. In claiming to be about an internal world divorced from its relational roots, it has missed many chances to understand the whys and wherefores of the makings of that internal world at the same time as it has had a lesser impact than it might on allied fields of scholarship.

Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) stands out as a premier clinical psychoanalytic clinical journal that addresses forthrightly the concerns of the social and the psychoanalytic. Born in th