Book reviews
Abstract
Psychoanalysis and Women ıs a thoughtful, provocative collection of artıcles written by feminist psychoanalysts. It is consistent with the feminust crıtique of science ın questioning the dominanttendency in Western thougnt of seeking a unversal, neutral epistemology by factoring out individual char-acteristics (Alcoff, 1989). Classical psychoanalysis has tried to follow this program by adherıng to a positivist conception of the analyst as a blank screen and objective bystander to the analytic process. The analyst's gender (as an instantıatıon of her personal characteristics) was not thought to inform the analytic process. This objective stance masked the extent to which both psychoanalytic theory and practice often reproduced culturally accepted biases agaunst women.