Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements [Hardcover]

Donna Bassin (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0765700816 | ISBN-13: 978-0765700810

Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements is the collaborative project of fifteen contemporary psycho-analysts who were asked to select a paper that had been generative in their clinical practice with women.

Each author then wrote a commentary, a substantive essay in its own right, introducing the classic selected, reexamining it from a current viewpoint, and mapping out the specific stepping-stones from the chosen classic to his or her own clinical work. Reading the inherited paper along with the contemporary essay provides a rare opportunity for a reader to experience the development of new ideas, with their own integrity, from the past. The book provides easy access to the generative texts on women in clinical thought, and contributes to the building of a psychoanalytic library with context, continuity, and creativity in dialogue with our predecessors and contemporaries.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a wonderful anthology, and wonderfully interactive. It's like a kaleidoscope with three kinds of wheels—classics old and new, commentaries contemporary and historical, and reflections on how psychoanalytic engagements create psychoanalysis; you can turn the wheels and watch the topic 'female sexuality' move, complex and clichéless, before your mind's eye. (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Ph.D. )

Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements is a big book, not just in size but in its delivery of a broad-based exploration of what we know and don't know about female sexuality. Themes central to the past decade are elaborated, and contrasted with the new emphasis on the body itself. Bassin's very exciting book is over five-hundred pages, and still leaves the reader longing for more. (Ethel Spector Person, M.D. )

This fascinating collection of classic and generative papers on gender and sexuality can claim as its most singular accomplishment the fact that the interpretive essays paired with each paper are themselves major works of psychoanalytic writing. Editor Bassin has succeeded in convening a living legacy of writers and readers who embody the creative, interpretive community that will keep psychoanalysis urgent and its questions wide open well into the twenty-first century. (Virginia Goldner, Ph.D. )

About the Author

Donna Bassin, Ph.D., is an art therapist, clinical psychologist, and a certified psychoanalyst with a private practice in Manhattan. She is a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research where she serves as Director of the Women's Center at the I.P.T.A.R. Clinical Center. As a founding member of the Doris Bernstein Memorial Section on Gender Issues in Psychoanalysis at I.P.T.A.R., she has encouraged contemporary investigations into the role and meaning of gender in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Dr. Bassin is Associate Professor of Psychology at Pratt Institute, New York; Supervising Analyst at the Contemporary Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, New Jersey; and a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. She has co-edited Representations of Motherhood (1994). Her papers and reviews have appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Psychoanalytic Psychology.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 508 pages
• Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc. (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765700816
• ISBN-13: 978-0765700810
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,827,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)