"Will the woman's inner life continue to remain a closely guarded secret despite all the efforts that female analysts have made since Freud to cast light on the prevailing darkness? Or is a woman's fertility, her ability to give birth, so powerful that men and even women themselves must invalidate and deny it, or that women must guard it as their secret in order to prevent its destruction?".

"Through her analysis of fairy tales, classical mythology, clinical analytic situations, and her own experience as a woman and as a mother, the renowned Finnish psychoanalyst and scholar Elina Reenkola offers a powerful examination of the status of women within pschoanalytic theory and within society as a whole. She explores intrafamilial relationships and, perhaps most importantly, the bounds of women's own bodies and minds.

She questions the meaning and significance of pregnancy - of the capacity of a woman to hold a separate human life inside themselves - and motherhood. Having transformed our perception of womanhood and its vicissitudes, Reenkola finishes by insisting that we face the ultimate female conundrum: What is femininity itself? Does it exist? Can the female analyst implement her own femininity within the analytic context to soothe the analysand's psyche?"--BOOK JACKET.