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Ilka Quindeau assigns herself no small task. In an era when niche sexualities proliferate throughout virtual chatrooms and private parties, when reproductive possibilities are no longer entirely dictated by nature, and when same-sex marriage has become a matter of rights, it is hard to know what more we can ask of sexuality or what else remains hidden.
Within the field of psychoanalysis, debates about race, class, and the Other appear to have displaced arguments over sexuality and pathology. We appear to have settled our differences and sunk into a comfortable complacency over the failures of classical psychoanalysis to deconstruct its limitations and ideological straight jackets. We have moved beyond our past and loudly reject the idea of characterizing specific sexual desires as symptomatic of underlying pathological symptoms per se and now explore the meaning and function of any given sexual pleasure, practice, or fantasy in the context of a person's personal biography. Plurality blooms as we traffic in multiplicities, genders, sexualities, and unlimited possibilities for making meaning.
As a result, flipping through subheadings and chapter titles that highlight perversions, anal eroticism, urethral eroticism, and infantile pleasure, the first temptation is to assume this book has little to offer an enlightened audience: isn't this debate over? But Quindeau's thoroughly argued and persistent insistence on a revival of attention to infantile sexuality and a reintegration of the body, which leads to a refocus on pleasure and gratification-a call to revive the central role of the sexual (not sexualities) as the original force behind a dynamic unconscious-is worthy of attention. It may pull the pendulum back from what might seem like looping discussions around relationality where primacy is given to affect regulation in self states, attunement and failures, and trauma and dissociation, all of which have important roles in any analysis but leave the unconscious poised t