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In this volume, Socarides provides a summation of his professional life's work on homosexuality and the perversions. When an analyst devotes so much time and energy to the study of an important topic and is willing to publish the product of his thought, we can only be appreciative. Yet there are shortcomings in methodology and presentation that give us pause.
The book is a collection of papers, many of which were published previously and have been brought up to date to conform with the author's latest thinking. Because of the format and poor editing, the same ideas are presented repetitiously. They are also declared emphatically, imparting a polemical character to the volume. The first part of the book is theoretical. It deals with Socarides's general concepts of the etiology and treatment of perversions. The second part consists of case histories that illustrate the application of those concepts.
Socarides's central theme is that the basis of well-structured homosexuality and all perversions is a preoedipal fixation. The author states that the nuclear conflict in all these disorders is between the wish for re-engulfment by the mother and the dread of such merging. He agrees with earlier authors that homosexuality is the result of conflict, but he disagrees that the conflict can be explained entirely by means of the structural theory. He utilizes—and indeed emphasizes—object relations theory to explain the early stages of development of the perversions, especially citing lack of differentiation during separation-individuation. He invokes the concept of object relations conflict to explain the lack of differentiation of self from object and consequent problems in the formation of identity, particularly gender identity. He follows the view of Greenson that the boy first identifies with the mother and then must later disidentify from her and form an identification with the father. Failure