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Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots was published almost twenty years after Robert Stoller's unexpected and tragic death in 1990. The book's existence came to light when Sybil Stoller handed Professor Richard Green a manuscript by her late husband that had languished on a bookshelf in her home for sixteen years, having been returned when his publisher discontinued its series of psychoanalytic books.
Stoller notes at the outset that the book is unique, even among his original contributions, in that it considers pornography not simply as a sexually arousing picture or text, but as a conscious daydream, a naked primal daydream that not only summarizes the individual's erotic preferences but mirrors his or her character in ways that go far beyond the erotic component. Stoller's transformative definition of pornography requires us to think in new terms about the transformation he has outlined from the sexually arousing object to the daydream. In this regard, it is important to note that the dearth of psychoanalytic attention accorded the daydream allows the unquestioned assumption that daydreams (Freud 1908; Person 1995; Goldberger 2008) can be dealt with solely in terms of manifest content and do not require the detailed analysis we know is required with night dreams.
As a psychoanalytic candidate at what was then the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, I had the privilege of being in one of the few classes that Stoller taught to candidates. Because of the demands made on his time by his prolific writing, his editorial work for psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals, his university duties, and his presentations on the national and international level, he seldom accepted invitations to teach at the institute. He was an electrifying teacher, one who drew students—UCLA medical students, whom he taught regularly, residents, and psychoanalytic candidates—into the topic or text that he was teaching. The course I attended, like the book at hand, possessed an immediacy not unlike takin