You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As could be expected from a consummate Freud scholar, this book is larded with deep examination and interpretation of Freud's work in the areas of sexuality and the human condition. Rosine Perelberg sets out the basic position early. In the introduction, she describes Freud's assertion that humans have a drive which does not ‘correspond to any representation but is expressed through the repetition compulsion’ (p. 1). She goes on to say, ‘If the drives are at the root of psychic activity’ this inevitably means there is an excess which threatens to overwhelm the ‘psychic organisation’.
When Philip II of Macedon was busily warring around the Greek states in the 320s BCE and triumphing wherever he went, he sent a message to the Spartans saying if he invaded, they would be irrevocably destroyed (Ellis, 1976). The Spartans replied with the one word - ‘If’. Perelberg does not investigate the ‘if’ in this book to explore the different theories and perspectives on whether human beings are basically more drive driven or more object seeking. Fairbairn argued that the Freudian emphasis on drives and impulses was only half a story; in 1943 he wrote ‘the time is now ripe for a psychology of object-relationships’ (p. 60). Since then, probably more has been written, at least in the UK, about object relations than most other psychoanalytic subjects. Other than noting that for Klein ‘drives and objects are intrinsically linked’ (p. 78), however, Perelberg does not really enter into a discussion about these matters. What is on offer here is a Freudian-based understanding of human sexuality and of the work of psychoanalysis. On that basis, it is a tour de force.
The first part of the book describes the psychoanalytic understanding of the inherent bisexuality in all humans, and that, by definition, the power and force of these drives mean that sexuality is always in some way a trauma. Perelberg (p. 34) defines three terms - sex (‘a biological differentiation’), gender (‘a social construct