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"""A seminal text in the womenís movement."" –Ethel S. Person, author of The Sexual Century ""Still the most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration, its re-release is a celebratory occasion."" –Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women and Mortality ""[The Mermaid and the Minotaur] continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere."" –Jessica Benjamin, author of The Bonds of Love"

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9781892746252

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This book is a game-changer. -Gloria Steinem, from her introduction To the very largest degree this book is exciting and valuable and belongs in every prominent library of feminist thought. Dinnerstein writes beautifully, often eloquently, and she argues brilliantly...a stirring view of the common psychic life of men and women and its relation to the whole of organized human history. -Vivian Gornick, New York Times Book Review The most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration thus far. Its re-publication is a celebratory occasion...The book is disturbing-almost frightening-in certain parts of its analysis. Truly facing and understanding its message, however, is an act of liberation. -Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil A seminal text in the women's movement. -Ethel S. Person, author of The Sexual Century [The Mermaid and the Minotaur] continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere. -Jessica Benjamin, author of The Bonds of Love

That Freud's insights are still revolutionary - whatever his Victorian limitations - is never clearer than when he has as worthy an heir as psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein. Freud's vision of our prolonged infancy as a time of physical helplessness and omnipotent fantasy, erotic bliss and cannibalistic rage, is central to Dinnerstein's brilliant, dogged, difficult enterprise: linking neurotic sexuality to ecological catastrophe and urging deep revision of human arrangements. But Dinnerstein goes beyond Freud (and her other mentors Norman O. Brown, Simone de Beauvoir, and Melanie Klein) in her startling central point: that both the mutual psychic crippling of the sexes and the death-denying, life-destroying juggernaut of progress have their origin in the fact that our violent infant ambivalence - prototype for the human ambivalence toward life itself - is always directed toward a woman. From this obvious fact Dinnerstein derives in exhaustive detail the neurotic symbiosis between men and women, each sex in its. own way sub-human. But she argues cogently that the female monopoly of early child care is by no means the biological given we assume it is. Rather it stems from historical necessities which have now become obsolete. Dinnerstein is most concerned to understand why, then, we have not rushed to change sexual and parental roles. She concludes that we have a deep emotional investment in the status quo, not only because it fulfills real needs in its twisted way, but also because women's availability as scapegoat lets us avoid facing and integrating out radical ambivalence toward both bodily life and enterprise. Dense, urgent, repetitively argued, this will repay slow, careful reading with a sense of the poetry and paradox of life - and the human responsibility for survival. (Kirkus Reviews)

This book is a game-changer. --Gloria Steinem, from her introduction To the very largest degree this book is exciting and valuable and belongs in every prominent library of feminist thought. Dinnerstein writes beautifully, often eloquently, and she argues brilliantly...a stirring view of the common psychic life of men and women and its relation to the whole of organized human history. --Vivian Gornick, New York Times Book Review The most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration thus far. Its re-publication is a celebratory occasion...The book is disturbing--almost frightening--in certain parts of its analysis. Truly facing and understanding its message, however, is an act of liberation. --Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil A seminal text in the women's movement. --Ethel S. Person, author of The Sexual Century [The Mermaid and the Minotaur] continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere. --Jessica Benjamin, author of The Bonds of Love

Author Information

Dorothy Dinnerstein Dorothy Dinnerstein was born in a poor Jewish section of the Bronx, New York City, in 1923. As a psychologist, she worked with such well-known names as Kohler, Wertheimer, and Asch. She was a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University for thirty years and lived in New Jersey until her death in a car accident in 1992.

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