"I feel that Chodorow’s most salient and certainly most influential insights have come from her edgy vantage point as a knowing outlier. Now from the center, her edginess and boldness still continue and we can all hope that new insights and challenges to our understandings of gender and sexuality will continue to be forthcoming." -Nancy Kulish, International Journal of Psychoanalysis"Nancy Chodorow is the greatest gift to psychoanalysis that the social sciences and anthropology could have ever given us. An intrepid explorer, she combines a seasoned, scholarly feminist wisdom with prodigious clinical knowledge and expertise 'from behind the couch.' She maps here the whole theoretical territory of sexuality, gender, femininities, and masculinities. She traverses from the late 1960s onward her own intellectual, publication, and speaking history that has, in fact, guided the forward strides in these aspects of our field. You will find gems of the brilliance of her thinking in these papers, even in details in the footnotes, in her commentary on the contexts of each development, and in her own rich and evolving presence in the powerful and influential oeuvre." - Rosemary Balsam, Yale School of Medicine, Connecticut, USA"No one has influenced the psychoanalytic view of gender as profoundly as Nancy Chodorow. For decades she has systematically deconstructed the received truths from Freud and other psychoanalytic thinkers while preserving faith in the psychoanalytic project as the most compelling method of understanding the human condition. In this wonderful new work, her brilliant and original thinking is summarized in an extraordinary collection of essays. As the title suggests, she refuses to fall back on facile generalizations. Instead, she asserts that psychoanalytic understanding is geared to the particular, the idiosyncratic, the unique, and the complex. This book will be of considerable value for the teaching of trainees in psychoanalysis and the mental health professions, but experienced clinicians will also benefit from spending time with the rich material between its covers." - Glen O. Gabbard, author of Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting (2000)"In this retrospective collection, Nancy Chodorow's brilliance and breadth of knowledge shine. For those who saw The Reproduction of Mothering fly off the shelves in hardcover, as well as those who have just begun to read her, here is a behind-the-scenes view of a major thinker at work." - Muriel Dimen, editor of With Culture in Mind (2011)"Individualizing Gender and Sexuality is an amazing compliation from one of the greatest thinkers of our time: feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow. The opportunity to read comments, revisions, and ideas from such a powerful thinker is a special gift. Chodorow's fabulous ability to write in a way that flows only adds to this experience. Chdorow is an absolutely beautiful writer. Her work is technical yet personal, clinical yet theoretical, all at the same time. Her work simply flows, which is no simple feat, given the level of theoretical discussion and the transtheoretical nature of her work." - Geneva Reynaga-Abiko, PsycCRITIQUES"[Chodorow's] essays brim with incisive, wry, and at times humorous insights...I greatly enjoyed the evocative reach of this book. The changing incarnation of her feminist vision not only illuminates Chodorow's engaging book, but also may keep beckoning her in her treasure hunt of ideas. We would all be rewarded in jogging along." - Lora Heims Tessman, Ph.D., Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 48, No. 3"In Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, Chodorow brings together psychoanalytic and sociological analyses to ponder the questions of gender and sexuality... She builds a convincing argument that gender requires as much pluralist theoretical understanding as the 'clinical individual' him or herself... I find this complex layering to be the key strong point of the book... It will provoke questions. It will push you in a critical almost archaelogical search for texts that matter... In many ways, this book is an invitation into an exploration on gender. Bon voyage!" - Aleksandra A Staneva, University of Queensland, Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia
