The Sexual Century, by Ethel S. Person,  Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999,  387 pp.

The Sexual Century reproduces papers on sex and gender written by Ethel Person over the last 25 years, first with her mentor, Lionel Ovesey, later alone and with colleagues Coates, Terest man, Myers, Goldber, Salvadori, and Borenstein. It is extremely valuable to have this important work collected in one place. Many of Person's observations about the psychodynamics of sex and gender have become incorporated into the theoretical formulations that our field recognizes as accurate and fitting with observable facts. While it is easy to assume that we always understood these concepts as she has formulated them, this is untrue. Many of these points were first made by Person and Ovesey. Person derives her formulations not only from Freud and Ovesey but from object relations theory, self psychology, cultural anthropology, and feminism. Her scholarship is comprehensive and her writing style is crisp.

The chapters of the book are not organized chronologically but rather by topic. There are 5 sections: I—Sex and Gender: General Considerations; II—Cross-Gender Disorders; III Sex and Fantasy; IV Sex and Gender: Female Sexuality and Femininity and Male Sexuality and Masculinity; and V—The Impact of Culture: The papers were originally published between 1973 and 1998. Obviously, thinking about some of these topics has evolved over this time. (An example would be the removal of homosexuality from the list of sexual disorders, which psychiatrists and psychoanalysts diagnose.) When her current thinking deviates from her original formulations, Person so indicates in footnotes, so that the reader has the advantage of both reading the original work and learning how the author's understanding has evolved over time. The articles are enjoyable to read straight through from beginning to end but stand by themselves and can be appreciated each on their own.

Several articles are particularly noteworthy. In the 1980 paper, “Sexuality as the Mainstay of Identity: Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” Perso