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One of the most enduring misconceptions about psychoanalysis is that it is sex-obsessed. While inaccurate, this view is also not entirely without substance. Starting in the mid-1890s, Freud began to pour out a cornucopia of views on human nature absolutely drenched in sexuality: Oedipus, Dora, transference love, polymorphous perversity, penis envy, childhood urges and fantasies, and, of course, that pugnacious seduction theory.
To this day, popular mythology has it, psychoanalysts continue to niggle and nit over every slip, pause, tic, or dream, forever on the hunt for all things sexual. This misguided and simplistic view (though it is equally a verdant and telling social fantasy holding fascinating insights about the mores and anxieties of our time) has settled into a festering mound of compost, incessantly thrown up as the LV-book-jacket-image for all things psychoanalytic.
Perhaps you have your own version of what I semi-affectionately call the “cocktail-party reaction” to being asked what I do. The torrent of associations commonly produced when I respond that I am a psychoanalyst, were I working rather than trying to enjoy crudités and a goblet of Pinot Noir, would be material enough for the entire first phase of a treatment: You're examining everything I'm saying and doing right now like with x-ray glasses, and thinking I want to sleep with my mother and kill my father, right? You probably think everybody's gay or some sort of pervert and just in denial about it, right? All you ever think about is sex, right?
As a professional group, psychoanalysts have not worked very effectively to redress these (and other) misperceptions. The brief episodes when psychoanalysis enjoyed some measure of relatively wide social acceptability, even caché, notwithstanding, it is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as embattled,