Freud's Women: Family, Patients, Followers - Hardcover

Lisa Appignanesi is a novelist and writer. Her fiction includes Paris Requiem, Sanctuary, The Dead of Winter, and The Things We Do for Love, among other novels. She is also the author of Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir, a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir, and Cabaret. John Forrester, Professor of History and Philosophy of the Sciences at Cambridge University, is the author of Truth Games, Dispatches from the Freud Wars, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, and The Freudian Century.

Freud has always provoked controversy among feminists. Appignanesi ( Memory and Desire , LJ 1/92) and Forrester ( The Seductions of Psychoanalysis , Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1990) attempt to explain this controversy by looking at the women who were important in Freud's life. Unfortunately, the book is not comprehensive as biography--Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (Norton, 1988) is the best choice for information on Freud and his immediate family--nor as a history of analytic thought, since such theorists as Melanie Klein and Karen Horney, whose positions on female development have had a powerful impact on analytic thinking, are not discussed in detail. (These women had no face-to-face contact with Freud.) Paul Roazen's Freud and His Followers ( LJ 9/15/74), while considerably more critical, is a good single source of biographical information on most of the early leading Freudians. Overall, public libraries can generally skip this title; academic libraries that support women's studies programs should consider it for its summary of theories of female psychology.
- Mary Ann Hughes, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
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