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This admirable and well-researched book is structured into four parts, three of which tackle the following – “What does Oedipal development have to do with the parents’ sex, anyway?”; “What does genetics have to do with kinship, anyway?”; and “What does procreation have to do with parental coitus, anyway?” The fourth part is an afterword tackling the questions “Oedipus for everyone?” and then “How to work with same-sex families”.
The book aims to update the Oedipus complex for a contemporary audience and explore its implications for our understanding of, and the practical experiences of working with, queer families.
Dr Yifat Eitan-Persico’s use of questions to structure her book tries to build a bridge between the psychoanalytic and empirical fields (26) and invites the reader to challenge their (perhaps) accepted heteronormative and heterosexual views of fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory, namely:
… Freud[’s] … primal phantasies are the seduction phantasy (the Oedipal phantasy), the castration phantasy, and the phantasy of witnessing parental coitus (the primal scene) … all … share the child’s preoccupation with origins: “In the primal scene, it is the origin of the subject that is represented; in seduction phantasies … it is the origin or emergence of sexuality; in castration phantasies, the origin of the distinction between the sexes”. (7–8)
Eitan-Persico embarks on a wide-reaching and exhaustive research project, spanning several years, to investigate these phantasies in 33 children between the ages of four and six, who have been planned and cared for within same-sex relationships. Her specific focus was on those same-sex parents who were raising a child born with the assistance of gamete donation. This entailed interviewing the parents together and individually, and interviewing and presenting cards to the child designed to elicit curiosity and stories related to their family configuration. In this way the reader is able to follow the path that Eitan-Per