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Letter to the Editor

I would like to thank Dr Nancy Chodorow for her letter. I understand that Dr Chodorow is displeased with my choice of Dr Paula Ellman to review her book The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition in these pages and with Dr Ellman’s review. However, I take issue with some of Dr Chodorow’s claims and hope my addressing them will lead to her greater satisfaction. First, while it is true that Dr Ellman is the current Chair of the IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis, she is not only that. Dr Ellman is also Faculty and a Training and Supervising Analyst at both the Contemporary Freudian Society and the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis (APsaA), and a long-serving member of the Board of the Journal. Thus, I take issue with Dr Chodorow’s opening question that seems to suggest Dr Ellman is in some way not up to the task of reviewing her book and was selected only because of her expertise in the area of women and psychoanalysis. I believe it would do Dr Ellman a disservice to suggest that she is not enough familiar with the work of Loewald, Erikson, ego psychologists, intersubjectivists or Dr Chodorow herself to review her book, and myself a disservice to suggest that I “pigeonholed” the author by selecting Dr Ellman when she is in fact a strong theorist and writer in her own right, not only regarding women’s issues. Second, it has never been a requirement, as Dr Chodorow knows having herself served as North American Book Review Editor (NA BRE), that a reviewer for a book need to have published in the area of the book’s subject; indeed creating such a requirement would greatly limit the number of potential reviewers of books. Finding an appropriate reviewer for an author such as Dr Chodorow, whose career has been both distinguished and long lasting, is challenging as one cannot simply ask the colleagues with whom she developed the American middle school approach since these are intimates with whom she has shared professional relationships for decades, and creating a rule such as that has potential to result in logrolling among friends rather than critical evaluation. Dr Chodorow positions her letter to suggest that the choice of reviewer should be obvious – someone who might be able to read from “inside” the book and “from the point of view of the author” but I do not think that choice is obvious at all. She writes that a reviewer might read her book “in the way that we try to listen clinically”. To me that suggests an ear attuned to a different perspective, as well as a perspective of one’s own broad enough to appreciate these differences. Instead of viewing Dr Ellman’s background and interests as a hindrance to a larger contextualization of Dr Chodorow’s book, I see them as informing her ability to read Dr Chodorow’s work as it relates more broadly to the various currents of psychoanalytic ideas. When I select a reviewer I do not look for someone who lives in the same house as the author does, but someone who lives in the same neighbourhood. With reference to the review itself, I believe Dr Chodorow has overstated the degree to which Dr Ellman or myself has approached her work as limited to gender issues. Dr Ellman does just what Dr Chodorow claims, “summariz[ing] the book chapter by chapter”, addressing issues of the American middle school, intersubjective ego psychology, aggression and its relation to culture, and tensions between sociology and psychoanalysis, and describing the