cover image Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women's Experience

Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women's Experience

Ellyn Kaschak. Basic Books, $25 (265pp) ISBN 978-0-465-01347-0

Kaschak, a feminist psychotherapist, believes that being a woman in our society induces depression, phobias, eating disorders and a fragmented sense of self. Females' bodies and selves are ``gendered'' from the moment of birth, she maintains, by a culture in which the masculine defines the feminine by naming, evaluating, containing and invading it. In this highly perceptive, original book, she reworks the myth of Oedipus, which she interprets as not just a story about a cursed son (as Freudians maintain) but a family drama involving King Oedipus's dutiful daughter Antigone, conceived through incest in a patriarchal society. Using modern women's ``Antigone complex'' as a starting point, she develops a psychological model designed to help women reconnect with themselves and other women, to go beyond being defined by men, subject to protection and violence, to adulation and humiliation. Her scholarly yet accessible approach draws on her clinical work with patients as well as on feminist psychologists' writings. Kaschak is a psychology professor at San Jose State University in California. (July)