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For almost thirty years, Ethel Person has studied and written about sex and gender. Her articles, originally composed with her mentor, Lionel Ovesey, to whom this volume is dedicated, and subsequently republished alone and with other collaborators, are reproduced in The Sexual Century. Yale University Press has done the psychoanalytic community a service not only by collating these important contributions, but also by arranging and presenting them in an informative fashion.
Ovesey, whose frame of reference was adaptational,1 was considered a maverick by the psychoanalytic establishment of his time. In fact, the articles he wrote prior to his partnership with Person were not published in classical psychoanalytic journals, such as the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association or the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, but rather, in Psychiatry and similar venues.2, 3, 4 Person—whose ideas draw upon Ovesey's and Freud's, as well as on object relations theory, self psychology, cultural anthropology, and feminism—is clearly part of the psychoanalytic mainstream. Times have changed.
The book is arranged thematically in five major parts: (I) Sex and Gender: General Considerations; (II) Cross-Gender Disorders; (III) Sex and Fantasy; (IV) Sex and Gender: Female Sexuality and Femininity and Male Sexuality and Masculinity; and (V) The Impact of Culture. The writing style is elegant and lively. Witness, for example, Person's description of Harry Benjamin, the sexologist who delineated the syndrome called transsexualism in the early 1950s: