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The expectant psychoanalytic reviewer might be forgiven some complacency as he began a book about sexual excitement by Robert Stoller. He could expect writing that was refreshing and insouciant. And he would know that Stoller had already made substantial contributions to the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. The foundations of that theory were laid when Freud (1905) dared to uncover the multiple infantile roots and the unconscious dimensions of adult sexuality. Later (1912), Freud commented on the immaturity, psychoneurotic distortions, and infantilisms of the sexual lives of "civilized people." After the dual instinct theory became a cornerstone of mainstream thinking, it was easier to recognize the clinical fact that derivatives of aggression, more or less tamed, are present in all sexual acts, fantasies, and feelings. In that tradition, one knew beforehand that Stoller would argue that for all people some of the time, and most people all of the time, the experience of sexual excitement is less than mature, contains infantilisms, and retains elements of covert or even overt destructiveness.
But for this reviewer the task turned out to be difficult. He could recall no psychoanalytic book that caught him up in such an intense fantasied dialogue with the author. He found himself enthusiastically agreeing, disagreeing, arguing; he was sometimes delighted, sometimes irritated; at some moments he wished there were a way to literally applaud and at others to literally decry. Sometimes all he felt was a mild sadness.
Sexual Excitement is not so much about sexual excitement in general as it is an exploration of the unconscious roots and genetic origins of a complex masturbation fantasy in a young woman. It is not so much about her unconscious fantasies as it is a remarkable attempt to truly portray a specific analytic process. It is not so much an attempt to portray the process as to interpret it in certain controversial ways. It is not so much an attempt to in