In this powerful and important paper Stein uses the notion of excess to explore the contradictory nature of sexuality. In particular, she is interested in excess as an ‘antithetical’, self-contradictory term that denotes ‘both liberated pleasure beyond bounds and abominable transgression and destructiveness’ (p. 43).

At the heart of Stein's paper is a call to clinicians not to use theory to avoid the irreducible unsettling ‘otherness’ of sexuality. For example she writes (p. 45):

Both drive theory and object relations theory have been used to encase too narrowly the complexity of human sexual experience, and their reductionist use in totally explaining sexual experience may have been a factor in the insidious marginalization of sexual experience and the forgetting of its otherness.