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As is always the case for me with Joyce McDougall, I had the sense while reading Theaters of the Body that I was being taken firmly in hand and plunged into an exciting psychoanalytic adventure. She is imaginatively attuned to a diverse range of psychoanalytic thought, to the dominant intellectual, social, and ethical issues of her times, and to her own inner world. Her great gifts are intuitive, experiential, and synthetic. Her observations and characterizations can be stunning in their originality. Something suddenly becomes obvious that we had somehow missed until she gave us her name for it: the normopath, the antianalysand, and the neosexualities are good examples.
Her characterizations cut across categories—diagnostic, therapeutic, and theoretical…which often constrain psychoanalytic thought. In this book, she brings her formidable powers to the realm of the psychosomatic. Her terminology is, as always, evocative, clinically illuminating, and amply illustrated by rich case material. “Disaffectation” and “affect dispersal” refer to those means of dealing with overwhelming feeling states that may only be discharged or massively defended against, not represented or contained in fantasy and language. “Foreclosure” links such states and their characterological sequelae to Freud's writings. “Psychic deprivation” is the term that characterizes the extreme poverty of emotional and relational experience that is the terrifying reality behind the precociously autonomous masquerade of real life that patients with psychosomatic disorders present to the world. The notion of “addictive solutions” connects their underlying characterological style to the classic physiological addictions; bodily urgency, nonreflectiveness, and impulsive action reflect an “addiction” to sexuality and objects. Early