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As the authors of its foreword acknowledge, this monograph is more obviously heterogeneous than its predecessors. While any such enterprise carries this risk, it seems that in this
case, beyond the stylistic and theoretical differences between the authors and the diversity of the sexual disturbances considered, the heterogeneity in fact reflects the tension and breadth of the field. This adds to the interest of this multi-author work. After all, because the concept of sexuality is so central to psychoanalysis, it is impossible to discuss the ‘sexual disorders’ in the narrow sense (impotence, frigidity and perversions at different ages) without examining its pivotal function and its role as a fundamental reference-point, so that a treatment of the basic conceptions of psychoanalysis, its field and its implicit nosography is then automatically entailed. Sexuality is still the psychoanalyst's shibboleth, even if the manifest emphasis has shifted in the last few years to identity problems and the so-called narcissistic pathologies, while the disorders involving sexual symptoms that were the focus of interest of the early psychoanalysts have to some extent gone out of favour.
In ‘Le sexuel freudien. Une énigme originaire toujours actuelle’ [The sexual in Freud. A primal enigma that is still relevant today], Bonnet deals specifically with the symptomatic character of this (partial) ‘forgetting’ of the sexual as far as present-day analysis is concerned; reviewing the evolution of the concept and field of the sexual in Freud's oeuvre, he strongly emphasises its importance as a foundation of psychic functioning. But whatever the basic common ground shared by all analysts in regard to the shibboleth of the sexual, if we read Chasseguet-Smirgel's paper ‘Les religions du diable: quelques réflexions sur les significations historiques et sociale