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.
SEXUALITY, TRAUMA, AND CREATIVITY—how are they related? Seeing chapter titles on these topics, many readers will be attracted to Joyce McDougall’s latest book. It is an extension of McDougall’s fascinating case studies and her ideas about “neosexualities” introduced in
her previous work. Woven into the narrative are McDougall’s own reactions to patients, including her dreams, written in a fascinating and readable style.
McDougall’s major thesis is that eroticization is a means of coping with early trauma. When such a defense fails, the archaic sexual impulses are foreclosed from consciousness, resulting in somaticization. She presents a number of cases, many of which she has discussed previously, to support this argument. I think she is convincing.
Known for her interesting and original insights about mind-body connections, McDougall is at her best when discussing this topic. She describes a primitive body language, a protolanguage, intended to communicate to the other world in the early life of the individual. The task of analysis, as she sees it, is to translate “bio-logic into psycho-logic.” Her thinking and rich case examples show a convergence with recent research that demonstrates the subsequent illnesses of people who say they are unaware of experiencing any emotional distress while they show physiological indications of such distress (Pennebaker, 1990).
In McDougall’s view, the deviant, or “neosexual,” have circumvented castration anxiety and Klein’s depressive position. She seems to include homosexuals in this group. Many interpersonal and relational analysts will have difficulty with her Freudian assumptions about the centrality of castration anxiety. These are recast from her previous (1980) ideas about concerns of the fate of the woman’s penis into the view, in this volume, that the girl fears her insides will be annihilated. McDougall’s idea is that men and women who develop neosexualities are trying to play out the illusion that castration is harmless a