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Durer's Adam and Eve, naked but fig leafed, gaze at one another under the attention-grabbing title of this book by Gerald Schoenewolf, coauthor of two other books with catchy titles, 100 Common Therapeutic Blunders and 101 Therapeutic Successes. The book jacket informs us that the “signs of sexual animosity are all around us and appear to be on the rise” and that the “author takes a centrist position between the poles of feminism and masochism” in dealing with the origins of sexual animosity, which the classic Freudians attribute to women's penis envy and men's castration fear and the feminists to phallocentric cultural values that favor men and oppress women.
After perusing the title, the photo of the painting, and the book jacket, the reader will be in for quite a disappointment. In his attempt to be comprehensive, Schoenewolf provides one-paragraph summaries of extremely complex theories. Citing animal and human research, he makes a quick sweep of psychological and psychoanalytic theories of development and mercurially whizzes from Chinese philosophy to Greek myth, to religion, to literature, to the theater, to real-life crime, and then back to the couch. This is quintessential “kitchen-sink” writing. Everything is included, and whatever focus the author has is lost. Everybody's theory is included, theories that are so very different from one another that comparisons cannot really be made. He mixes early Freud with Coles, Spitz, Spotnitz, Mahler, Klein, Winnicott, Kohut, Kardiner, and Montague. Dogs, cats, monkeys, Hopis, Zunis, and children of urban professionals are put into the same stew. I wondered how Freud and Laing would feel about being paired in a sentence like this: “Freud and Laing point out that what we refer to as child-rearing is actually a form of hypnotic induction” (p. 104). Books like this create strange bedfellows. Even when the author stays within one field, there is a hodgepodge