In this long-awaited book, a leading psychoanalytic feminist traces the development of her views on the psychodynamics, sociology, and culture of gender. Expanding upon her pathbreaking work in The Reproduction of Mothering and combining significant new writings with previously published essays, Nancy J. Chodorow elucidates how the unconscious awareness of self and gender we develop from earliest infancy continues to shape both our experience as men and women and the patterns of inequality and difference that exist throughout our society and culture. "Chodorow is an exceptionally...

In the middle of the twentieth century, leading cultural critics and visionaries--Erik Erikson, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and many others--turned to psychoanalysis as a measure of human personal and cultural fulfillment. Now, as we enter a new millennium, Nancy J. Chodorow, well known as a feminist theorist and psychoanalyst, takes her place in this line of eminent thinkers and revitalizes their project. Psychoanalysis, she claims, offers in its clinical goals and its vision of possibility insight into the nature of subjectivity and the quality of good relations with others. It...

Nancy J. Chodorow takes her fellow psychoanalysts to task for their monolithic and pathologizing accounts of deviant gender and sexuality. Drawing from her own clinical experience, the work of Freud, and a close reading of psychoanalytic texts, Chodorow argues that psychoanalysis has yet to disentangle male dominance from heterosexuality. Further, she demonstrates the paucity of psychoanalytics understanding of heterosexuality and the problematic polarizing of normal and abnormal sexualities. By returning to Freud and interpreting psychoanalysis through clinical eyes, Chodorow contends that...