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The aim of this book is to describe the operations of the ego in love and sexuality. The author believes this study has been neglected, whereas psychologists have paid close attention to hostility and aggression. Fried's clinical examples are derived from her experience in analytic psychotherapy with individuals and groups.
The author describes the bodily changes and the ego regression that occurs during sexual experience. The neurotic's inability to tolerate these changes accounts for frigidity and impotence. She discards Freud's concept of the repetition compulsion and attributes pathology somewhat exclusively to a fear of excitement. This is implied when the patient is described as a 'poor releaser', and unable to 'consume excitement' even if he could 'digest it'. When a patient picked up a purple pillow, felt it, and hugged it, this increased sensuality was seen as a 'conspicuous sign that the fight for a "yes" reaction was being won'.
Fried's concepts are borrowed from psychoanalytic terminology, but ignore the full richness and complexity of psychoanalytic concepts. This is illustrated in her idea of narcissistic isolation and narcissistic leaning. Narcissistic isolation leads to object choice based on similarity to self, and exists because the patient knows no better way to establish a relation. The author states that many sexual disorders, impotence, frigidity, homosexuality, 'and other so-called perversions' are the result of isolation and insulation. Therapy consists of 'holding to what we might call broadly a reconditioning', and includes 'encouraging the patient not to dwell on his homosexual condition'.
The book falls into the category of writing about psychoanalysis that strives toward simplification and popularization, but ends in