Toward Less Fixed Internal Transformations of Gender Commentary on: Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender by Meg Jay,Ph.D.

While highly commending this cross-disciplinary exercise and agreeing with Jay and Butler that children may indeed mourn the loss of erotics with same-sex parents as they identify and develop in a gendered fashion, this author highlights, in both Butler and Jay's interesting further refinements of Butler's position in their use of Freud's 1917 paper on “Mourning and Melancholia,” a lack of attention to the significant aggression that Freud also included in this early formulation concerning the lost object. A consideration of such affects is well taken, but this author prefers a less sparse and monolithic linear clarity about how girls grow into sexed and gendered women. She feels the limitation here of the use of later analytic theory such as Loewald's rich account of internalization.