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This is a book that would seem to be of direct relevance to psychoanalysts, a book which has drawn considerable attention, and which has received extremely enthusiastic reviews, and laudatory send-offs by Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt. Its importance for us as psychoanalytic clinicians lies neither in its intrinsic merits nor in the strength of its underlying arguments (both of which can be questioned on varying disciplinary grounds); it lies in the connections Laqueur makes between sexuality and cultural values and assumptions, in the questions he raises, knowingly and unknowingly, about the nature of privacy, the self, and sexuality.
Laqueur's thesis is simple and strikes root in the current orientation of cultural studies and social constructivism. “Masturbation,” he writes, “is the sexuality of modernity and of the bourgeoisie who created it. It is the first truly democratic sexuality” (p. 18). “Modern masturbation can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history.” It originated in 1712, and is “a creature of the Enlightenment” (p. 13). Laqueur dates modern masturbation to the publication of Onania, its founding text. He continues: “Situating this text—and the years around 1712-in the history of sexuality and selfhood is in some measure an exercise in the history of medicine” (p. 15). Many of the books that might have helped him formulate his ideas about the cultural history of ideas of the self (e.g., Bruno Snell, Aries, H. Ellenberger, E. R. Dodds) are missing from his footnotes, and there is no bibliography.
Thus Laqueur makes an historical assumption of dubious merit: he assumes that the publication of a book on masturbation in 1712 demonstrates how masturbation was thought about and experienced by those of the period, an assumption which even the bravest of those French historians associated with “l'Histoire des mentalites” might shy away from. While Foucault in his work on the history of madness makes similar sorts of claims, he has a somewhat f