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Joyce McDougall's books have made themselves required reading in the psychoanalytic world. She has written extensively about sexual perversions and psychosomatic illnesses, both being problems that are not often part of every analyst's clinical experience. McDougall has original views on these subjects, as well as on the vicissitudes of the creative process, another issue in which she takes great interest. Because her hypotheses on the etiology of problems in these various areas take her to the earliest stages of infancy, McDougall has managed to interweave these formulations with theories on the development of the self, of the body self and their functioning both in health and when this breaks down.
Joyce McDougall writes with great lucidity and authority. Her ideas are based on rich clinical experience and she has an impressive grasp of the theoretical formulations of analysts from many schools of thought. When the typical analytic paper will quote exclusively from members of the author's adopted school, Joyce McDougall is conversant with and quotes extensively from Kleinian authors and from ego psychologists, Lacan and other French authors, Winnicott, and many others. However, Joyce McDougall follows her precepts and demonstrates that learning should be a step towards creativity and originality, and not part of a process of intellectual enslavement. The Many Faces of Eros is dedicated to her eminent friend, Robert Stoller, who devoted immense efforts to the psychoanalytic understanding of sexual phenomena and who first investigated in detail the link between the child's gender problems and the mother's psychopathology.
The Many Faces of Eros concentrates on the ‘psychoanalytic exploration of human sexuality’, but time and again themes and patients from her previous books are focused on in the discussion. In Theatres of the Body she studied the puzzle of psychosomatic illnesses and in Theatres of the Mind she addressed ‘illusion and truth on the psychoanalytic sta