Sexuality and Mind. The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche: By Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. New York/London: New York University Press, 1986. 167 pp.

This short but closely reasoned book consists of a series of lectures on topics ranging from Freud to female sexuality and even to the Green movement in Germany. But it has a unifying concept, delineated in Chapter 5, "The Archaic Matrix of the Oedipus Complex." Here one finds the distilled essense of Chasseguet-Smirgel's thought, as it appears in this book and in her other works.

She relies heavily on Melanie Klein: "It is a question of genetic theory with a precise date: oedipal tendencies occur in the second half of the first year of life, and it is the interior of the mother's body which becomes the stage for the expression of these instincts …" (p. 75). She goes on to explain the central position Klein gives to the fantasy of destroying or taking over the contents of he mother's abdomen, appropriating the father's penis, the children, and the feces inside the mother's body. This impulse, according to Chasseguet-Smirgel, is connected to the positive and negative oedipus complex; but there is an even more archaic fantasy. It is the wish to return to the mother's abdomen entirely smooth and stripped of its contents. This becomes translated at the level of thought into a desire to discover a universe without obstacles—a mind functioning without hindrances, with psychic energy flowing freely. The father, his penis, and the children represent reality and have to be destroyed, so that the mode of mental functioning proper to the pleasure principle may be recovered. The fantasy of emptying the mother's abdomen is the fantasy of destroying reality. Chasseguet-Smirgel and Klein disagree only in that the latter considered the mother's body equivalent to reality, whereas the former considers the contents of the abdomen, not the container (i.e., the mother's body) as equivalent to reality.

The author describes Freud's view of the oedipus complex as more structural and less genetic than is that of Melanie Klein. Chasseguet-Smirgel finds Freud's approach best exp