Sensuality and Sexuality across the Divide of Shame: Sensuality and Sexuality across the Divide of Shame [Volume 25 of Psychoanalytic inquiry book series] by Joseph D. Lichtenberg  Taylor and Francis,  160 pp., $39.95, 2007

Although I intend later in this review to criticize Joseph Lichtenberg's thesis regarding the divide between sensuality and sexuality, I want to begin by praising what he does achieve in this book. His many years of experience as a clinician and writer, his profound knowledge of attachment and developmental theories and research, and his own inherent sensitivity, enable him to craft a remarkably attuned portrait of the multi-layered, nuance-rich experience of the child in relation to self and primary others. Furthermore, the language in which he presents his view of the child's developing relationship to father, mother, and siblings is creative, deeply empathic, and quite accessible. As he says, in the final section of the book,

I try to incorporate the essence of the theories that I want to retain by conveying their meaning in more ordinary language, believing that the richness of understanding human struggles, rather than technical terminology, is what determines whether a proposal is psychoanalytic (p. 147).

Lichtenberg clarifies that his book is “designed to present a broad conception of sexuality” (p. 147), so that, rather than emphasizing pathology, his purpose “has…been…to stay within the range of sexual and social issues that [typify] a broad middle ground of people and couples who…work out some strategy…for their attachment and lustful love” (p. 146).

While defining his territory as “the broad middle ground” (p. 146) of sexual experience considered as a motivational system, Lichtenberg additionally sets himself the task of persuading his psychoanalytically oriented readers to expand their notions regarding the origins and development of human sexuality. As he acknowledges in the introduction, the “reformulation” (p. xi) he makes in this book is relatively straightforward: Infants, toddlers, and older children seek “pleasurable body sensations and schemas and fantasies that elaborate hedonic bodily experience” (p. xii), and, while some parents and authority fig