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I would like to designate this ground-breaking work as “Contemporary Freudian”: it is fresh and contemporary, integrating a rich field of various psychoanalytic ideas on firm Freudian ground. Perelberg discusses many of Freud's most important writings on both the topographical and the structural models of the mind. In addition, Perelberg integrates, in a masterful way, important aspects from the three traditions in the British Society—Independent, Contemporary Freudian, and Kleinian—but especially Winnicott, who is an important source of inspiration. Sexuality, Excess, and Representation, like her previous book, Psychic Bisexuality: A French–British Dialogue, is also a truly “British–French dialogue,” where, among others, the voices of Lacan, André Green, Laplanche, the Botellas and Chabert can be heard. It is refreshing that Perelberg does not get bogged down in old controversies, either in Britain or in France. Instead, she takes her inspiration from all the best sources available and, in the process, creates her own unique perspective.
As Perelberg says,
Psychoanalysis has, since Freud, viewed sexuality in itself as traumatic to the individual. This traumatic dimension is linked to the force of the drives in that there is always something in excess that cannot be reduced to the level of representation. (10)
The traumatic dimension of sexuality also relates to the recognition of the difference between the sexes, the result of a long process of development and elaboration. In its homosexual and heterosexual dimensions, the Oedipal configuration confronts the child with the impossibility of belonging to both sexes, as well as the impossibility of possessing their parents. This establishes a link between sexuality, castration, renunciation, taboo and prohibition. (10)
According to Perelberg,
the revolutionary contribution made by Freud is the idea that one is not born already formed as a man or woman, but one is constituted as such in the process of development. (10)
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