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From the title of this ably translated volume, published originally in German in 2008, one would expect to find within its pages a comprehensive review of recent theoretical work on psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality. Instead, what Ilka Quindeau, president of the Sigmund Freud Foundation and professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt, offers in three overly long chapters is her own contribution to the subject, based unfortunately on synthetic reading and personal opinion rather than original research or casework. Whereas Freud's Three Essays (1905), her avowed model for this project, focuses on perversion, puberty, and infantile sexuality, Quindeau has chosen as her major foci the seduction theory, gender differences, and sexual preference. Within these three broad rubrics she presents a number of mini-essays that allow her to explore a wide range of topics and produce something like a unified field theory of sexuality, albeit an uneven and ill-integrated one.
At the heart of Quindeau's project is a modification of Jean Laplanche's adaptation of Freud's seduction theory (2006). Nachträglichkeit, translated by Strachey as “deferred action” (Freud 1895, p. 356 n. 1) and by