You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this monumental endeavor, Eric Marcus applies his sophisticated theoretical perspective to the transcendent growth potential that is human sexuality. His laudably ambitious three-pronged educational mission involves teaching us first, how to investigate the detailed phenomenology of human sexual experience and behavior; second, how to describe the intact or damaged mental functions and their influence on sexual intimacy; and, third, how to understand the crucial psychological benefits sexuality serves in facilitating our psychic growth and development. Marcus is one of our best, and perhaps last, ego psychology apologists. He defends this once hegemonic theoretical orientation because he believes only it offers a psychodynamic theory with the requisite complexity and universal applicability to describe and understand all of human experience.
Though this is a standalone book, it would serve well as a companion piece to Marcus's by now classic introduction to modern ego psychology, Psychosis and Near Psychosis, now in its third edition. In both books, he meticulously catalogues the terminology required to describe the phenomenology of human relational life in terms of its processes, ego functions, and purposes. This book's investigation into aspects of human sexuality is simply an application of his general human psychology, a widening of the scope of his system of thought to the arena of the body and its sexual transformations. Hence, as a paradigmatic example, an investigation into fetish phenomena describes the processes (sequences, in time and space), the ego functions (intact or
damaged), and purposes (enabling progress past a specific node of the sexual arousal cycle). Marcus goes beyond simple content-based definitions (e.g., the fetish represents the penis to compensate for castration anxiety) to how fetishes have multiply determined content (e.g., wish-fears not just sexual but of ambition, intimacy, and attachment), which are also disguised (defended) a