Book Notice

The Gender Conundrum: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Femininity and Masculinity



by Dana Birksted-Breen

Vol 18. in The New Library of Psychoanalysis
Published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group)
0-415-09163-2 1993 hbk
0-415-09164-0 1993 pbk

"One of the appealing things about this book is the clarity of its introduction. While the book covers some of the thorniest debates in psychoanalytic literature, it does so within a framework. In her introduction, Birksted-Breen summarises thinking since Freud on various topics related to gender in a way that spans the gaps between different cultures and theories. She lets us listen to each other in a context, and in this way helps makes a variety of authors' ideas clear, in a way each would not be if presented singly. This book is not so much a collection of classic papers in the field as a response to such papers. It is a presentation of contemporary debates. The papers are mostly from the 1980s, and range from 1969 to 1990. A wide variety of theoretical perspectives is represented, including Kleinian writers, ego-psychologists and contemporary French thinkers, some previously untranslated. While the specialist in gender studies will have an easier time situating these papers amid contemporary debates, Birksted-Breen's introduction attempts to allow the general reader to do so."

"This would be an excellent book for candidate seminars or study groups to read in conjunction with classic papers on masculinity and femininity because it offers an international range of material and emphasises current themes of debate".

Alice Jones
IJPA

 

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"The virtue of the book... lies in the exhaustive, and thoughtful background research undertaken by Dana Breen. The scope of the research lays the ground for her judicious selection and imaginative organisation of contemporary psychoanalytic writings on the vast and very alive topic of the Oedipus complex and the gender conundrum.

The key to Breen's organisation of the book can be gleaned from her forty-page introduction. It is both pithy and thought-provoking. In this introductory essay Breen presents the reader, in a highly digestible and amenable form, the sheer scope of Oedipus theory, both in its vertical-historical and in its more horizontal-contemporary dimension. Freud, Klein and Lacan constitute the major theoretical triumvirate in relation to whose thought contemporary trends and controversies are situated and evaluated."

Cyril Couve
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

 

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"Breen organises this unruly territory by re-examining in particular the question of the woman's psychosexual development. This issue highlights a tension she suggests is inherent in psychoanalysis between its concern with how the mind construes experience and, on the other hand, the fact that the mind is situated in the body and cannot be abstracted from it.

The breadth of Breen's knowledge of the three main traditions and the clarity of her discrimination about their essential differences makes this a book all analysts and psychotherapists interested in this subject will wish to posses."


Jane Temperley
Book club of the British Society

The books in this series can be ordered from Karnac Books Ltd



 

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