Brody S.R., Arnold F. (eds.) Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership

Routledge, 2019. — 199 p. — ISBN 978-1-138-84268-7.Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership considers how these factors can be understood, nurtured, or thwarted and the subsequent impact on women’s identity, authority and satisfaction. Psychoanalysis has long struggled with its ideas about women, about who they are, how to work with them, and how to respect and encourage what women want. This book argues that psychoanalytic theory and practice must evolve to maintain its relevance in a volatile landscape. Each section of the book begins with a chapter that reviews contemporary ideas regarding women, as well as psychoanalytic history, gender bias, and societal norms and deficits. Three composite clinical stories allow our distinguished contributors to discuss the contexts within which individual experience can be affected, and the role that clinical work may have to mobilize and advance passion and vitality. In their discussions, the interplay of clinical psychoanalysis, sociopolitical context, and understanding of gender, combine to offer a unique perspective, built on decades of scholarship, personal experience, and clinical expertise. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership will serve as a reference for all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars interested in the progress of psychoanalytic theory regarding women in the 21st century.Desire
Desire: what women want
Marie: a story of desire
A clinical case of desire
The present absence of desire in a dead body
Frazzled desire: out of time
Ambition
Female ambition: psychoanalytic perspectives
Elizabeth: a story of ambition
Commentary on Elizabeth: a case of the othering of a woman’s ambition
The case of Elizabeth: a discussion of ambition
Elizabeth: appropriated ambition … a narrative
Leadership
Leadership and women: opportunity mobilized
The social construction of female power and leadership: a psychoanalytic perspective
Claire: a story of leadership
Feminine agency and identity amid mother-daughter alienation
Women and ambition: our ambivalent under-indulged pleasure
Discussion of Claire: identity, conflict and subjective reality in women leaders
Difference, connection, identification