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This collection of 13 chapters on the topics of sex, intimacy, and gender should be of some interest to psychoanalysts who are unfamiliar with the language, issues, and conceptualizations used by family and couples therapists. The chapters vary greatly in style, quality, and relevance to one another. Most seem to reflect sociological rather than psychological
thinking. The hopefulness of the 70s, when there was considerable optimism about real change in the way the sexes interacted with one another, permeates this book and may be inspirational to some readers.
Evidently, issues of love, sexuality, and intimacy have not been typically addressed in couples and family therapy. Instead, the strategies and structure of power and dominance have been stressed. In my work as an individual psychoanalyst, in which I struggle to understand the galaxy of transferences operative within one patient at a time, I find it incomprehensible, even grandiose to conceive of managing an entire family! As Michael Vincent Miller, in his chapter “Transference and Beyond”, points out, however, in many family treatments, the person is obliterated; the unity of the family and the couple is idealized, and the needs of the individual are minimized. In the emphasis on themes of dominance and power, Miller notes that family therapy is really “a chess match in which the therapist is the superior player” (p. 102). Family therapists as depicted in this book are neither neutral nor abstinent (as in the traditional Freudian model). Yet there are no rules or guidelines as to what roles they should take as they intervene.
There is a valuable, but unrealized book in this poorly edited collection. The reader is left to sift and cull rather that receiving editorial guidance about some progression of thought. There is considerable overlap among the three sections—conceptual, person of the therapist, and clinical applications—why these distinctions are made is unclear. The book's greatest contribution seems to