Sexualities: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives, edited by Alessandra Lemma and Paul E. Lynch,  Routledge, 2015

Sexualities may be read, in its entirety, as a choral attempt to unfreeze some psychoanalytic assumptions that, drawing upon a normative understanding of the oedipal resolution, have deprived sexuality of its historicity, ultimately disavowing its inherently fluid, enigmatic, and ego-alien qualities. Contributors to this book variously articulate the importance of divesting sexuality of the illusion of fixity and normality, and reinvesting it with the centrality and plasticity well understood by Freud, but then lost in the American ego-psychology and British object relations traditions—the father and mother of a psychoanalytic progeny often ill-at-ease with the sexed body and the vagaries of desire.

This collection of essays, opened by a historical contextualisation of psychoanalytic homophobia (Dagmar Herzog), is structured in three thematic sections: “Foundational concepts for a contemporary approach to sexualities”, “Homosexuality”, and “Perversion revisited”. It is rich, varied, and current in its theoretical and clinical references to sexualities and symptoms increasingly relevant in the contemporary Western society. These include atrophy of desire (Marilia Aisenstein & Donald Moss); variety of understandings of perversion (Heather Wood); unsymbolised manifestations of traumatic aspects of sexuality (Avgi Saketopoulou), and newly recombined sexual identities such as “bears” and “metrosexuals” (Vittorio Lingiardi). Overall, the theme of homosexuality takes centre stage. The editors explain this choice on account of the fact that “psychoanalytic thinking in this domain has not developed as much as it needs to” (p. 13). Various contributors (Nicola Barden; Peter Fonagy & Elizabeth Allison; Vittorio Lingiardi) acknowledge that sexual orientation is not inherently aligned with gender identity and that understanding sexuality is about exploring the subjective meaning, history, conflicts, and gradients active in each individual's psychosexual development, whatever the