Gender and Desire-hardcover

Description

Uncursing Pandora Contradictory and provocative pathways crisscross the terrain of gender among contemporary psychologists and psychoanalysts. Clearing a path through this terrain, Polly Young-Eisendrath describes and illustrates issues of gender and desire among women and men. Young-Eisendrath discusses gender and sex differences in terms of how the former are flexible and the latter are not. The division of the human community into the two exclusive groups of male and female has important psychological implications on both conscious and unconscious levels. Most depth psychological theories of gender and sex have been androcentric, taking males as the norm for health, and have failed to develop a full understanding of desire, opposition and idealization between the sexes. For men and women to reach their full potential of development as individuals and in relationships, they must break Pandora's curse and free themselves from the myth of the power of female beauty. In working to liberate us from the curse of Pandora, Young-Eisendrath has developed a theory of desire: desire contains within it a primordial absence, a sense that something is missing. When we come to understand the nature of desire itself we can be liberated from its domination.

This book is part of the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology.