Presented here is a new form of psychoanalysis, one that is centered on women as seen by women. Women Analyze Women contains interviews with nineteen of the most prominent and innovative women analysts and writers. The authors have persuaded them to speak freely on topics such as feminism, sexuality, love, gender differences, and sometimes their lives as anlysts and analysands, political activists, wives, and mothers. Personal and intimate, these sessions cut across theoretical barriers and allow the analysts to speak directly and candidly, as the following excerpt from the interview with Joyce McDougall shows: "Men and women deal with tender and erotic feelings differnetly. If I speek in very simple terms, it seems to me that women are constatnly eager to stabilize their love relationships and within those, their sexual relationships. They are always terrified of abandonment, rejection, and loss. The men are terrified of getting caught. It is a wonder that the sexes ever get together at all. Men are frantic about getting trapped, and women are frantic about being left." The book offfers intriguing, provocative, and stimulating discussions of critical issues, revealng a number of startling differences and remarkable similarities among the more avant-garde French anlaysts and the more tarditional Anglo-American schools. ELAINE HOFFMAN BARUCH, who has a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, is a professor of English and women's studies at York College of the City University of New york. She is the author of numerous articles on literature, psychoanalysis, and women, and is the coauthor of Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States (with Lucienne Serrano) and coeditor of Women in Search of Utopia and Embryos, Ethics, and Women's Rights. |
