Freudians and feminists /

This new work by Kurzweil (The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective, CH, Jul'90) traces the long and often quarrelsome history of relations between proponents of Freudian psychoanalysis and feminists and suggests a symbiotic rather than antagonistic interpretation of that history. Kurzweil, editor of The Partisan Review, writes with authority about the political and sociological context in which Freud's thinking about women developed, and she provides a detailed summary of most of the major points of intersection between psychoanalytic and feminist theory in Freud's original circle and in the English, US, French, and German psychoanalytic communities during the 50 years since Freud's death. Kurzweil's argument distinguishes between a "First Wave"--modernist, empirical--and a "Second Wave"--postmodernist, Lacanian--feminism. She is consistently critical of the latter, and one value of her book will be as a stimulus to discussion of postmodern feminist theory. The bibliography is quite thorough for a work of this length, and both early theorists such as Horney, Deutsch, and Klein, and recent ones such as Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigarey are interestingly summarized and evaluated. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty. D. A. Davis; Haverford College