Book Notices

André J, Dejours C, Denis P, Perrot M, Schaeffer J, Schneider M, Vanier M (2005). Les sexes indifférents [Sexual non-difference]. Paris,  PUF. (Petite bibliothèque de psychanalyse.)  153 p.

This multi-author work proposes a review of the current upheavals in modes of sexual life, familial structure and advances in science and medical technology, including the possibility of reproductive techniques based on cloning. Do these debates have relevance to psychoanalysis? Jacques André and the authors invited to his seminar give an affirmative answer but they also take pause for reflection. Whether in terms of non-difference or difference, the concept of femininity and masculinity or of sexual difference is something that evolves over the centuries. Is the proposition of sexual non-difference compatible with the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality? Does the question of bisexuality and psychosexual identity remain inextricable from libidinal pressure? And from the conflict resulting from sexual difference? With sexual non-differentiation, the role of primary and secondary homosexuality emerges as a form of civilising sublimation. What about otherness and the love for another?

Auerbach JS, Levy KN, Schaffer CE, editors (2006). Relatedness, self-definition and mental representation: Essays in honor of Sidney J. Blatt. London and New York:  Routledge.  316 p.

This festschrift for pre-eminent researcher and psychoanalyst Sidney Blatt, professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale, focuses on the many areas to which Blatt has made important contributions: personality development (communication modes, representations and spatialization), psychopathology, assessment of object relations and the Rorschach, different kinds of treatment research (process, outcome, singlecase), and applied psychoanalysis and character (greed, narcissism, attachment and faith). A partial list of contributors speaks to Blatt's significance and to the quality of this volume: Beebe, Jaffe and Lachmann, Freedman,