Nancy J. Chodorow

When this best-seller was published, it put the mother-daughter relationship and female psychology on the map. The Reproduction of Mothering was chosen by Contemporary Sociology as one of the ten most influential books of the past twenty-five years. With a new preface by the author, this updated edition is testament to the formative effect that Nancy Chodorow's work continues to exert on psychoanalysis, social science, and the humanities.

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 intelligent and serious writer, and her contribution to the debate on gender and sexual identity is substantial. . . . Through her deepening reflections on gender issues and her study of the reality of women's lives, Ms. Chodorow puts both Freud and feminism to the test."—Stuart Schneiderman, New York Times Book Review "In [a book] teeming with ideas, Chodorow . . . explores issues such as the influence of maternal care on the emerging self, social oppression of women on the basis of presumed gender differences, Oedipal conglict, heterosexual identification, and women analysts."— Publishers Weekly "These essays are as good a statement of the issues in feminist psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic feminism as I have seen, reflecting the knowledge and questions of an 'insider' in both areas. One is impressed by the richness of the implications drawn from observed constellations or relationships. This is book that should be of interest to a wide audience."—Malkah T. Notman, M.D., Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association "All readers will profit from reading all of the articles in historical sequence. Her own changes reflect some general trends in feminist and social science thought."—Miriam M. Johnson, Contemporary Sociology

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 psychoanalysis must consider individual specificity and personal, cultural, and social factors. Such a methodology entails a plurality of femininities and masculinities and enables us to understand a variety of sexualities.

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 continues centuries of reflection and imagination about the good life.In this pathbreaking book, Chodorow draws upon her broad knowledge and background in social theory, her feminism, and her experience as a psychoanalyst. In extensively elaborated chapters on psychoanalytic theory, she argues that a psychoanalysis that takes as its starting point the immediacy of unconscious fantasy and feeling found in the clinical encounter can illuminate our understanding of individual subjectivity and potentially transform all sociocultural thought. Creating a dialogue between feminism, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, she holds that feminism, anthropology, and other cultural theories require that psychoanalysts take seriously how cultural meanings help to constitute psychic life. At the same time, psychoanalysis demonstrates that contemporary theories of meaning cannot neglect the unconscious realm, which has just as much power as culture does to create meaning for the individual. Chodorow acknowledges postmodern accounts of the decentering and fragmentation of individuality but argues that psychoanalysis gives us an account of subjectivity that incorporates forms of wholeness and depth of experience, without which we cannot have a meaningful life.

Focusing on the uniqueness and complexity of each person's personal creation of gender and sexuality and the ways that these interrelate with other aspects of psychic and cultural life, Nancy Chodorow brings her well-known theoretical agility and clinical experience to every chapter, advocating for the clinician's openness, curiosity, and theoretical pluralism.

Nancy Chodorow, in her groundbreaking book The Reproduction of Mothering, quite simply changed the conversation in at least three areas of psychoanalysis, women's studies, and sociology. In her latest book, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, she examines the complexity and uniqueness of each person's personal creation of sexuality and gender and the ways that these interrelate with other aspects of psychic and cultural life. She brings her well-known theoretical agility, wide-ranging interdisciplinarity, and clinical experience to every chapter, advocating for the clinician's openness, curiosity, and theoretical pluralism. The book begins with reflections on Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, followed by considerations of Melanie Klein and Stephen Mitchell, as well as on her own work and on the postmodern turn in psychoanalytic gender theory. Subsequent chapters address contemporary clinical-cultural issues such as women and work, women and motherhood, and men and violence. Concluding chapters elaborate on the multiple ingredients and the personal affective, conflictual, and defensive constellations and processes that create sexuality and gender in each individual. Ending with a chapter on homosexualities as compromise formations, Chodorow deepens her account of clinical individuality and sex-gender transference-countertransference while bringing her readers back to Freud and to the many strands that followed, as she consolidates a consistent line of interest in sexuality and gender, theory and practice, sustained over a lifetime.

When this best-seller was published, it put the mother-daughter relationship and female psychology on the map. The Reproduction of Mothering was chosen by Contemporary Sociology as one of the ten most influential books of the past twenty-five years. With a new preface by the author, this updated edition is testament to the formative effect that Nancy Chodorow's work continues to exert on psychoanalysis, social science, and the humanities.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2000.When this best-seller was published, it put the mother-daughter relationship and female psychology on the map. The Reproduction of Mothering was chosen by Contemporary Sociology as one of the ten most influential books of the past twenty-fiv

THE POWER OF FEELINGS (Advance Uncorrected Page Proof, Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis) (Advance Uncorrected Page Proof, Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis)