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From a combination of half a dozen articles published in psychiatric journals, another in a French analytic forum, a new case presentation, and a number of deft essays to bridge the gaps, Stoller has fashioned a provocative and gracefully written book about some of the most puzzling unsolved problems of psychoanalytic psychology. Much of the work was primarily aimed at a readership steeped in biological reductionism, and Stoller used the topic of homosexuality convincingly to demonstrate that human behavior is (almost invariably) mediated through networks of subjective meaning. In the context of this book, the same arguments serve Stoller to remind psychoanalysts that the postulation of various libidinal types amounts to a biological reductionism all the more blameworthy because it makes use of untested biological concepts.
Whatever else he may be trying to say, Stoller has produced a devastating polemic against the dogmatic misuse of theory, the obfuscatory functions of unnecessary jargon, and the illegitimate construction of fictive entities through overgeneralization from limited samples. He has done this with wit and incisiveness and without throwing out the psychoanalytic baby with the methodologically unclean bathwater. To put this even more strongly, he has managed to write a psychoanalytic book that does not fall into any of the errors it castigates.
Stoller's most essential thesis is that, as a discipline, psychoanalysis knows very little about erotic life. Although he demonstrates this most cogently with regard to our putative understanding of homosexual and perverse behaviors, he also makes a good case for the possibility that our assumptions about heterosexual and nonperverse behaviors may be simplistic, based on disavowal of our ignorance through the invention of labels.
I believe that Stoller is right to point out that, if individual case studies suggest that some people become sexually excited when they manage to vomit or to put on a pair of Levis,