Unfinished Business: Pressure Points In The Lives Of Women

Library stamp FPD & BLEP, phantom ghost of Residual glue from pocket removal, FLEP, else content appears as new, unread and unblemished with black boards & DJ & poly covver displaying minimal surface/edge wear, as shown, with Taped ID at Heel of spine.

Kirkus Review: Four years of research and prodigious interviews with clinically depressed women are the basis for science writer Maggie Scarf's magnum opus: a review of women's "psychological tasks," decade by decade, and of the hazards of failing to negotiate them. Her role as participant-observer at prestigious clinics leads to impressively detailed, insightful, and always moving case histories--where her writer's eye for nuance (the shoulder shrug, the stubbing out of a cigarette, the eyeblink), as well as her lines in the dialogue, create scenes of dramatic tension and climax. But the in-between parts--Scarf's premises, summaries of the epochs of a woman's life, and conclusions--are often sticking points. Scarf believes that biology and culture incline women to depression at a rate far surpassing men. She believes that depression in women is almost invariably due to the loss of a love object--a loss in the inter-personal sphere which leaves the loser bereft of self; of a meaning to life. This state of vacuity is accompanied by kaleidoscoping emotions of rage, frustration, anxiety, and guilt, which, turned inward, can lead to suicide. The stasis of the depression reflects the woman's "unfinished business"--failure to evolve to independence, to "individuate"; failure, ultimately to resolve the parental conflicts of growing up. Such a view places Scarf squarely in the American psychoanalytic tradition with its strong Freudian underpinning modified by Jung, Sullivan, Erikson, and more recently, by the work of developmental theorists and animal behaviorists. Saying all these things--and repeating them ad nauseum as Scarf does--does not make them so, however. Scarf's look at America in the late Seventies legitimately pinpoints some of the problems of the times and the culture: the double bind of some women brought up to be passive and to identify with the male's "dream" (to borrow Daniel Levinson's telling phrase), at the same time that they are told to be assertive and independent. But surely this is not a universal situation reflecting all women at all times: nowhere is it written that adolescence is a time of "normal misery," nor that men are immune to interpersonal losses (though their depression may take different forms). Thus the tone of the book--the sense of biological depressogenic destiny--seems wrong. Daniel Levinson has said one cannot really write the book of stages of women's life because the cultural pattern is changing right now. So let us give high marks to Scarf for the quality and depth of her narratives (who can forget Doris, the lifelong seeker after paternal approval, or Diana, the well-bred matron whose husband's masked depression was part of her tailspin?) but regard the work as a perspective on a particular past, not universal truth.

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