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This volume is part of Robert Stoller's long-term study of the origins and dynamics of sexual excitement. Readers unfamiliar with his past contributions in this area may question the significance of Porn and find some incongruity between its contents and the widely held reputation of its author as a major figure in psychoanalysis. Basically, this small volume comprises a number of minimally edited transcripts of interviews conducted by Stoller with performers, directors, and script writers involved in the production of X-rated films and videotapes for heterosexual males. He uses the term porn for this specific category of pornography. There is very little commentary by Stoller; the transcripts speak for themselves. Nor is there any earnest attempt to deal with the politics, aesthetics, hygienics, or ethics of pornography.
One must evaluate this book in the context of Stoller's main contributions over three decades, an outstanding career unfortunately brought to a untimely, tragic end in a fatal accident in September 1991. He is especially renowned for his pathbreaking studies in the development of normal and pathological gender identity, the psychology of perversions, and the origins and dynamics of sexual excitement. Throughout his work is an emphasis on the prototypic erotic daydream, a consciously experienced fantasy that one invents for self-satisfaction. It reveals much about the individual, contains significant elements of life history, character structure, and neurotic conflicts and defenses. The erotic daydream can be a story worked out in one's mind, or it can be one produced and packaged by someone else as pornography. Stoller found pornography useful as a kind of laboratory specimen for the study of sexual excitement. He also suggested that, hypothetically, pornography could serve as a test of erotic inclinations.