The Sexual Century: Ethel Spector Person. New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1999,  387 pp.

The Sexual Century is indeed an apt title for Dr. Person's latest book. Since the unparalleled explosion of Freud's creativity between 1885 and 19051 (Cooper et al. 1989), Sigmund Freud, sexuality, and psychoanalysis have been inextricably linked in our conscious and unconscious thought processes. It is Freud who taught us that “sex has as much to do with mind as with genitals” (2). These earliest discoveries gave sex a “privileged place in psychic development” (2) and laid out the basic psychoanalytic principles that were followed by further major developments in theory and technique. Still, the analytic understanding of sexuality was, ironically, the area least developed by Freud and his early followers. Knowledge about human sexuality from a variety of other sources leading to radical shifts in cultural attitudes, values, and practice necessitated concomitant developments in the psychoanalytic understanding of sex and gender. Major advances in the biological understanding of sexuality, Money's “conceptualization of gender as separate from sexuality” (2), and the sexual and women's liberation movements mounted serious challenges to “libido theory as a fixed sex drive” (2). It was not until the middle of this century that our traditional theories of mind and sexuality opened to these advances.

Person dedicates this book to Lionel Ovesey (1915-95), a radical pioneer whose cutting-edge psychoanalytic research—primarily that homosexual imagery in heterosexual men can symbolize power and self-esteem issues (Ovesey 1969)—prescience, and collaborative mentorship had a formative influence on her thinking and research. She credits her “work on sex and gender as growing organically out of their collaboration” (xii).

The Sexual Century demonstrates not only the breadth and depth of over twenty five years of Person's work but also the fruitful cross-fertilization of psychoanalytic and socio-cultural perspectives grounded in innovative research. First and foremost a psychoanalys