Editors' Introduction

We have long been admirers of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Ph.D., both for her work and for the clear-minded consistency with which she has pursued it. Her clinical descriptions of the childhood world of anality—a regressive temptation common to all humanity but particularly prominent in the various sexual dysfunctions—are without parallel in their detailed breadth and clarity. Most valuable and original has been Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel's emphasis on the obliteration of realistic distinctions which accompanies such regressions to anality: the realistic distinction between the sexes; the distinctions between the generations, adult and child; distinctions between goals instantaneously realizable by wishful magic and goals realizable only by long-term growth and hard work; distinctions imposed by science as to what is possible and what is not; distinctions imposed by social codes as to what is permissible and what is not. All of these distinctions are obliterated in the service of avoiding the narcissistic pain and anxiety which they cause the child, and the regressed adult, if fully perceived. Beyond the clinical realm, Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel has been most perceptive and erudite in describing in the literature examples of such regression, and the consequences of such regression in political and cultural life.

Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel has been fruitfully developing these contributions over many years, as her bibliography in this issue will demonstrate. The value of her work was quickly recognized (e.g., Rittenberg, 1987). However, we cannot omit to mention that in recent years, particularly in the United States, with its prevailing cultural climate of postmodernism and political correctness, which has pervaded even psychoanalytic literature, it cannot have been entirely easy for Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel to pursue some aspects of her work. For us, these developments mean simply that we must now add moral courage to the list of Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel's attributes that we respect