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In this readable book Estela Welldon holds our attention by her clinical experience, deployed skilfully to demonstrate the creative views which she has developed from it. She shows her respect for the Freudian and Kleinian traditions, and her divergences from them, derived from her long treatments of perversions presenting in women. ‘Women can't have perversions because they haven't got a penis’ is one of the shibboleths she accurately dismantles, and along with it, some of its lesser, but Sacred, Cows. Welldon satisfactorily demythologises several Sacred Cows; in fact the intention to do so is implicit in the book's arresting title.
For too long, certain concepts were handed on from one generation to the next in our field, enshrined as idées reçues. Only men have perversions; perversions arise in a (failed) Oedipal stage of development; the baby is a woman's ‘second-best’ achievement, a substitute for the penis; child sexual abuse is the province of men, where it occasionally exists; many female patients' accounts of sexual seduction in childhood are fantasies (the subject of one of the latest passionate debates, especially as to its origins). the Breast is always symbolic of the whole mother - many workers in our whole field of dynamic psychology will have no difficulty in recognising this herd of Sacred Cows. Welldon persists reflectively in developing her own structure of thought beyond these developmental stages in the history of psychoanalysis, without excessive provocation and without wasting energy on too much confrontational argument. This is not to say that all her ideas are original nor that she claims originality where there is already in existence parallel or convergent work from others; she acknowledges and uses this fully as she proceeds, and it is the richness of her clinical experience which brings her own authenticity to the form and content of her book.
She extends the boundaries of the study of the psychology of the Self beyond the limitations of b