Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Nancy Chodorow takes her fellow psychoanalysts to task for their accounts of deviant gender and sexuality. In this her treatment of sexuality and love, she asks the question: is psychoanalysis capable of addressing questions of multiplicity and variability in gender development and gender diversity?

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Chodorow's latest book reflects further the influence of her psychoanalytic training on her well-established credentials as feminist sociologist. Since the era of her groundbreaking The Reproduction of Mothering (CH, Nov'78), her interests have widened to intrapsychic detail, and she here suggests a new direction in thinking about "sexualities." The intention is to avoid the problems arising from a monolithic theory of generic "man" and "woman." These papers were delivered at the University of Kentucky in 1990 as the Blazer Lectures. The first section is an excellent critique of Freud's views about women. Through the lenses of woman as subject (e.g., case reports) and woman as object (theory), she finds differences, the former being more complex than the infamous theory itself. The next two sections are more confusing: she argues against contemporary psychoanalytic writers for overly dwelling on the "homosexualities" at the expense of heterosexuality. She finds them at once too individual and too general in their approach. Her recommendation is for individualized "constructions of gendered experience," with emphases on cultural factors. Chodorow's book will interest feminists, cultural theorists, and psychoanalysts, especially those following her thought since the seventies. General; undergraduate through professional. R. H. Balsam; Yale University

Kirkus Book Review

Feminist theorist Chodorow conducts a complex, uneven, though occasionally intriguing investigation of some of the more controversial aspects of Freud's (and others', from Klein to Lacan) work on sex, gender, and psychoanalysis. Based on a series of lectures Chodorow (Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, 1989) presented at the University of Kentucky in 1990, this slim volume examines the limits of Freud's psychoanalytic theory and practice, and argues that they can still help us ``fully understand gender and sexuality in all their forms.'' Addressing the persistent criticisms of Freud by feminists, gay and lesbian theorists, and contemporary psychoanalysts, Chodorow largely agrees that psychoanalysis offers reductive and universalizing accounts of gender and sexuality (i.e., male dominance and heterosexualtiy are normal), but she expends great intellectual effort to illustrate exceptions and to provide more complex psychoanalytic understandings. Her first chapter contrasts the wide variety of outcomes of female development that Freud's clinical work actually acknowledges with the account of ``normal femininity'' that we often take for Freudian theory. In her most compelling chapter Chodorow contends that psychoanalysis does not have an adequate developmental account of ``normal heterosexuality,'' though all sexuality results from psychological struggle and needs to be accounted for. She contrasts this with the rigorous psychoanalytic examination of homosexual development, which provides something of a model. Least comprehensive by far (because there appears to be less source material) is her chapter dealing with how men and women love. Here Chodorow maintains that there are as many kinds of feminine love (or masculine love) as there are women (or men), and that they are shaped by culture, family, and personal psychology. Though this collection suffers from a dense academic style and does not significantly build on Chodorow's previous work, it nonetheless provides a provocative reminder that these are complex issues and that humans, with their capacity for individual variation, are complicated subjects.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978) helped rehabilitate psychoanalytic theory for feminism, which had rejected it on the grounds that Sigmund Freud's sexism invalidated all psychoanalytic insights, particularly those about women, femininity, and culture. Chodorow's book served as an introduction to object-relations theory and the work of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. D. Fairbairn, and others. Object-relations theory focuses on the child's early relations to objects--persons, parts of the body, and toys or other "comforting" things. The most significant of these for object-relations analysts is the mother. Object-relations theory concentrates on the importance of the child's relation to the mother before he or she has a fully developed sense of self. The theory derived from the work of Melanie Klein, one of Freud's disciples. Klein theorized that children of both sexes must struggle to separate themselves from the mother and develop a distinct identity, a task that is doubly difficult for the boy because he must repudiate his original feminine attachment to, and identification with, the female parent.

Whereas Klein emphasized the importance of fantasy and unconscious aggressive drives, Winnicott and Fairbairn stress the significance of "real" relations between the child and the mother and other objects, as if these were direct and immediate rather than mediated by unconscious, repressed desires. The result is that the mother is made almost entirely responsible for the child's development.

It is this emphasis on the woman's total responsibility for child care that Chodorow critiques. She argues that this is what reproduces the gender differences of patriarchy. Because girls are mothered by someone of the same sex, their egos are more fluid than those of boys, and they experience a sense of connection with other people. Boys must exaggerate their differences from mothers and other women in order to develop a separate and masculine self; consequently, they have trouble feeling a sense of connection with other people and tend to denigrate the feminine as a defense against being engulfed by it.

Many feminists have been persuaded by Chodorow's argument and have sought to apply her ideas to literature and popular culture. Critics, however, have been disturbed by Chodorow's retention of what is problematic about object-relations theory and its failure to address the importance of fantasy and the unconscious. Furthermore, Chodorow's call for joint parenting by men and women is seen by some as heterocentric, if not homophobic. Finally, she fails to attend to the importance of other differences between women, for example, of race and class, which must obviously impact on their sense of connectedness.

(Bowker Author Biography)