This series for TAP was an outgrowth of a conversation Melinda Gellman and I had over breakfast about a panel on the subject of female intimacy for the IPA conference in Buenos Aires in 2017. Melinda was deeply committed to this too-little-studied and too-negatively-interpreted topic. As a clinician working with women and girls, with women who were once girls, with women who have mothers, and women who are ambitious, who are leaders, what is written here could not be more important.

With a light touch, this collection of four essays render deep truths about the relations among girls and women. As the field redounds with women analysts, there has been considerable pushback against Freud’s conception of women as the “dark continent.” Yet, the dyadic female relationship remains suspended in time, inflected by derivatives of original psychoanalytic interpretations and their sociocultural surround. These authors—Melinda Gellman, Nancy Kulish, Ruth Imber and Frances Arnold and Stephanie Brody explore under-appreciated and under-researched areas of psychoanalytic understanding. While the five authors write tellingly about the lack of research, writing, and understanding, it is, in fact, “the other side of the story” that they tell, endorse—and on which they insist.