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As Professor Stoller himself states in the introduction 'This is a study of sexual excitement. It is the fifth book—perhaps more accurately, the fifth chapter in one work—on masculinity and feminity (gender identity), carrying forward ideas examined in my last book, Perversion'.
It may be helpful to recall that the previous works were:
Sex and Gender, Volume I: On the Development of Masculinity and Feminity. New York: Science House, 1968.
Splitting: A Case of Female Masculinity. New York: Quadrangle, 1973.
Sex and Gender, Volume II: The Transsexual Experiment. London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976.
The first was reviewed in this journal by Gillespie (1969) and the third by Juliet Mitchell (1976).
Throughout Stoller's works there has been a shift from the study of the frankly abnormal towards the more normal—or perhaps to the abnormal in the normal. At first his focus was on patients with chromosomal, hormonal and anatomical abnormalities of maleness and femaleness; then on any sort of gender disorder, whether or not there was biological defect (e.g. transsexualism). An interest in all aberrations that might illuminate gender identity led to a study of perversion and the thesis that hostility was a central dynamic in perverse sexual excitement. A main purpose of this latest volume is to show that the same factors which are found in excitements labelled perverse are also present in those considered normal. As the central part of it is a clinical illustration of the themes of the previous work it may first be useful to remind readers what those were.
In his previous book, Perversion, the fourth in the series on the development of masculinity and femininity, Stoller presented his belief that perversion arises as a way of coping with threats to gender identity, or sense of masculinity and femininity. His view differs in an important way from that of classical psychoanalytic theory which put castration