Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements

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.

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.