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On initially opening this book, I was hit by two striking features. The first was that, not only does the extent of the New Library of Psychoanalysis series, the Teaching Series and the ‘Beyond the Couch’ now run into a fifth page, but the titles reveal the extraordinary contributions to contemporary psychoanalysis of this series. The second impressive feature was to read of Rosine Perelberg's own professional journey and her serious national and international collaboration over years within the British Psychoanalytic Society, University College and Birkbeck College, London, and with colleagues in Germany, France and the USA. I felt I was in for a treat in reading and reviewing one of the latest books in the series.
Perelberg's introductory chapter further whetted my appetite. She concisely introduces and summarizes the themes that she will ‘unpack’ in the chapters that follow. I anticipate that, like myself, there are many clinicians who have yet to grasp fully what is meant by the ‘dead’ father, its importance and distinction from the murdered father, or who could readily spell out the manifold oedipal constellations in the various psychopathologies they encounter, let alone the many different ways ‘thirdness’ is understood. The introduction also made me look forward to her bringing together the ideas of psychoanalysts and anthropologists in thinking about the incest taboo and gender differences.
In Freud's Totem and Taboo, the father who had access to all the women and ruled by terror is murdered by the ‘horde of brothers’ wanting the women for themselves. The law of prohibition of incest then becomes necessary for society to survive to prevent further destruction (through murder in order to have exclusive access) and this law is the unconscious nucleus of all religions (and civilizations). The dead father is here constituted as the symbolic father, more powerful than when alive, possessor of the phallus and representative of the ego ideal and the law. Sexuality is