Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women. Repeatedly, developmental theories have been built on observations of men's lives. Here, Gilligan attempts to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result reshapes our understanding of human experience....

From the internationally renowned author of In a Different Voice, a remarkable debut novel: a love story that introduces an unforgettable character in modern fiction, Kyra, and a superb new fiction writer, Carol Gilligan. Kyra is an architect designing a new city, a woman of humor and courage living in a vibrant world of family, friends, and colleagues and determined to break out of old structures. When she meets Andreas, a director staging an innovative production of Tosca, neither wants to fall in love–and yet, inevitably, they do. Their story takes us from Cambridge and an island off the coast of Massachusetts to Vienna, Thailand, Cyprus, and Wales as Kyra seeks the deepest truths about herself, other people, loyalty, and love. This reaching leads her to commit singular acts that startle and shock, inspiring new freedom for others as well as for Kyra herself. Rich with Carol Gilligan’s signature gifts–emotional wisdom, subtle renderings of the intricacies of human relationship, conflict and choice, and lyrical prose–Kyra is a luminous, magnificent novel by a writer realizing the range of her powers....

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. The book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology (based on loss in intimate life) and resistance to it (based on the love of equals) to the Roman Republic and Empire and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. Democratic resistance in religion, psychology, the arts, and politics rests on free voices challenging patriarchal restrictions on the love of equals. In addition to examining why we are at war, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad....

Carol Gilligan, whose classic In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now offers a brilliant, provocative book about love. Why is love so often associated with tragedy, she asks. Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns?

Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s case histories, to Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels. Groundbreaking and immensely readable, The Birth of Pleasure has powerful implications for the way we live and love. ...