The Problem of the Passions

Throughout the ages, women have been represented as warm, nurturing caregivers with an intrinsically enhanced capacity for attachment and compassion. Feminists, however, are considered full of rage and devoid of the feelings that are "natural" to women. How then have feminists dealt with this dualism and, more specifically, with the "disagreeable passions?"
What has too often been missing from discussions of women's psychology is an account of women as ambivalent: both empathic and enraged, loving and hating. In The Problem of the Passions, Cynthia Burack fills this void, illustrating how the selective appropriation and interpretation of early psychoanalytic ideas by feminists has deemphasized or denied the disagreeable passions of rage and hatred in women and women's relations. Examining the work of such feminist theorists as Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, and Dorothy Dinnerstein in a new light, Burack argues that feminist social theory can be repaired through the incorporation of the pioneering psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein.
Of central interest to feminists, psychoanalysts, political scientists, and social theorists, The Problem of the Passions is essential reading for anyone concerned with feminism and questions of identity in social thought.

Cynthia Burack is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The George Washington University.