Intimate Environments: Sex, Intimacy, and Gender in Families: Edited by David Kantor and Barbara F. Okun,  The Guilford Press, New York, 1989,  394 pp., $42.00.

Michele Bograd, one of the contributors to this fine collection of articles, cuts straight to the heart (pun intended) of the matter when she states at the beginning of her conclusion that

Sex, eroticism, sensuality, lust, intimacy, longing — these passions exist in every human heart and are the stuff that dreams, as well as psychotherapy, are made of. Our culture both glorifies and vilifies love and sex. Families set the stage for the sweetest expression of intimacy and for its grossest abuses. Family therapy moves into the heart of this all: a clinical enterprise with deeply human meaning and consequences.

The history of the literature in family therapy has been remarkable in the extent to which these most basic elements of human motivation, meaning, and conflict have managed to be given the “once over lightly.” To some degree, as is several times implied within these covers, this lack has its historical roots in the history of the field and of its theorists, promoters, and practitioners.

Although often having been trained in and practitioners of more traditional psychodynamic approaches with their emphasis on the individual, many family therapists experienced subsequent disillusionment and rapidly migrated toward work with couples and families and a more systems-oriented perspective. In the course of their reaction against the “bath water” of libido theory and infantile sexuality in orthodox psychoanalysis, they tended to throw out the “baby” itself