Sigmund Freud famously asked “What does a woman want?” and the question has been posed repeatedly across every medium ever since. Now Maxine Mei-Fung Chung re-examines it in the context of 21st-century women’s lives in her new book, a distillation of 15 years’ work as a psychotherapist.
Memoirs lifting the lid on the therapeutic process from the analyst’s perspective have become popular in recent years, with Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Philippa Perry’s Couch Fiction the outstanding examples, demystifying with candour and humour a profession that is still regarded with suspicion by some, humanising the perception of the therapist and providing a useful counterpoint to more familiar narratives of mental illness written by those on the couch. What Women Want is firmly in this tradition, but it is most obviously aimed at the readership that flocked to Lisa Taddeo’s 2019 hit Three Women. Where Taddeo approached her subjects as an investigative journalist, embedding and living alongside them for extended periods, Chung’s studies are more analytical, informed by the necessary boundaries imposed by her role and her professional detachment – although, as she explores throughout the book, cool objectivity is not always possible or desirable in a therapist.
