Book Notices

Diamond, L.M. (2008). Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.  333 pp.

The author presents the results of her own ten-year study of 100 women, as well as a considerable body of psychological literature on gender differences in sexuality, to support the idea that female sexual identity is more changeable, and more susceptible to interpersonal and situational influences, than is male sexuality. This is not a psychoanalytic book, but it is relevant both to clinical analysts’ understanding of individual women patients and to the broader psychoanalytic conceptualization of sexuality.

Frie, R. and Orange, D. (2009). Beyond Postmodernism: New Dimensions in Clinical Theory and Practice. London:  Routledge.  243 pp.

This collection of papers presents a clear and balanced view of the postmodern turn that characterizes contemporary relational and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Contributions by Modell, Stolorow, Eagle, and others provide a sound introduction to postmodernism, its philosophical underpinnings and clinical implications, and explore the inherent problems of postmodern thought and the ways that contemporary psychoanalysis might address these.

Fry, H. (2009). Freud's War. Stroud:  The History Press.  223 pp.

A narrative of the Freud family's experience of war, from before the First World War to after the Second, and focusing on Sigmund Freud's son Martin and grandson Walter. The book discusses in detail not only the escape from Austria, but also the internment of both Martin and Walter as ‘enemy aliens’, their subsequent enlistment in the British Army, and Walter's service with special forces behind enemy lines in Austria in 1945, and later in Germany with the War Crimes Investigation Unit. The book makes use of previously unpublished family correspondence and photographs.

Greenberg, M. (2008). Hurry Down Sunshine. New York:  Other Press.  234 pp.

Among the many firsthand accounts of mental illness by patients and families that ha