Sexuality, Excess, and Representation: A Psychoanalytic Clinical and Theoretical Perspective, by Rosine Jozef Perelberg,  Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2020,  204 pp.

This collection of essays by the prolific author Rosine Jozef Perelberg unites four papers published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis with two previously published book chapters. The articles reflect her signature approach: a careful review of Freud's contributions, comparison with cross-cultural evidence based on Perelberg's anthropological training, and presentation of clinical vignettes to support her theoretical conclusions. The far-ranging topics covered in the volume include bisexuality, trauma, hallucinations and anxiety. This review will focus on three of the six chapters with briefer remarks about the three remaining chapters.

Part 1 is an extended single chapter, “Psychoanalytic understanding of bisexuality: a framework” republished from Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue. The piece, which served as the introduction to the volume, begins with the evidence for “psychic bisexuality” in Freud's writings. Dora's case, Perelberg argues, anticipates his later discovery of “the pre-oedipal passion for the mother expressed by children of both sexes” (p. 13). Complex psychic identifications are sorted in different ways into cultural gender roles as Perelberg demonstrates in her review of anthropological theories of sex and gender. She cites Françoise Héritier's influential theory that a male/female binary distinction is the cultural basis for all “systems of representation” (p. 28). Perelberg also reviews Claude Lévi-Strauss' theory that incest taboos mark the move from nature to culture, a theory very close to Freud's. She concludes that psychoanalysis is in pursuit of “psychosexuality,” which is not determined by a male or a female body. Psychoanalysts investigate “the unconscious phantasies that are reached après-coup through tracing the nuanced interplay of identifications as they are projected, enacted, and experienced in the transference and the countertransference in the analytic encounter” (p. 52).

Among her most interesting points i