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This anthology basically reflects an extremist psychoanalytic position, even as it is devoted to change and reinterpretation of theory. Not since the Chodorow book on The Reproduction of Mothering have I swum in a sea of psychoanalytic theory so convoluted that at times it seemed I might sink. The attempts at modernization of theory really become, for the most part, trivial euphemistic additions.
Yet this book is valuable. It offers a painstakingly detailed review of libido theory, and serves as a foil against which to evaluate one's own thinking. I am inclined to doubt that Freud would have agreed with many of the incrustations that have been added to his libido concepts, which metaphorically served to suggest that, at different periods, attention to pleasure and pain in various parts of the body, and especially in relation to the sexual, or early precursors of the sexual, do in fact exist.
Again, as a follower of Sullivan, whose interest and concepts of anxiety related to the interpersonal mode, I find it hard to make the connection between neurotic difficulties arising, regardless of the earliest moments of their inception, and the lack of interest in parenting styles, attitudes and practices, as well as other intercurrent traumatic events. Further, the dominant — perhaps exclusive — role played here by bodily sensations is incredible. It is my belief, as much so today as 37 years ago, when I began psychoanalytic practice, that healthy organisms turn outward and become involved in living, paying minimal attention to interior states. In saying this, I call attention to the universal theories derived from bodily sensations as essentially irrelevant, which is not to deny their occurrence in the neurotically ill, especially those who tend to somatize.
The chapter on the anal phase by Oliner is probably the most complicated and convoluted in the book, while that on a suggested preoedipal genital phase by Glover and Mendell is well reasoned, and that on the female Oedipus