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The last fifteen years have seen major developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Not only is contemporary psychoanalysis “marked by a pluralism unknown in any prior era” (Gabbard and Westen 2003), but psychoanalysts from a classical, ego psychological perspective have undertaken a process of intense reexamination of traditional conceptualizations of female development, gender, homosexuality, culture, and technique.1 Given that Muriel Dimen's book was advertised as offering a psychoanalytic view of sexuality that is new and clinically meaningful, I approached her work with great interest.
This volume, No. 22 in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, is a compilation of nine papers, revised and annotated, that appeared originally between 1989 and 2001. As stated in a prologue, Dimen has assigned herself the ambitious task of breaking through orthodox ways of thinking about “gender and sexuality, about body, mind, and society, about the problem of dualism” (p. 2). She aims to take us beyond what she sees as the reductive/deterministic view of binary distinctions such as mind/body, male/female, psyche/society. Her fervor—and I label it such because there is a militancy to her determination in these pages— stems from her conviction that dualism masks a power hierarchy that imposes a value judgment: confronted with a binary, we are drawn to evaluate the two polarities. Hence, she embraces postmodernism, which “marks the voyage from dualism to multiplicity” as it “privileges difference, fragmentation, and indeterminacy” (p. 30), in opposition to modernism's rationalism and commitment to an absolute truth. Dimen