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The Many Faces of Eros is an occasion for new readers of Joyce McDougall to discover her invaluable contributions on neosexualities, addictions, somatizations, and creative sublimations. McDougall has extended the territory of what has been called perverse psychic organizations and the role of disavowal to other subjective experiences that are similar in structure and aim. Prior readers will find McDougall, as usual, working to illuminate what has been hidden in her patients' communication—the inner but not quite symbolic world underlying the oedipal dilemma. In this book, she returns to her earlier theorizing and analytic work, at many points taking the reader to clinical narratives she has discussed before but adding a new specificity and suspicion, revising and reconsidering her theoretical contributions. As we have come to expect of her, McDougall brings richly detailed patient—analyst interactions to light up her theoretical organizers. Her ability to capture and her willingness to report those behind-the-scene thoughts and dreams of the analyst provide the reader access to what is usually privileged communication.
The central event of this volume, however, is McDougall's attempt to maintain the necessary tension between a truly empathic appreciation of the various solutions to the problem of the traumatic nature of human sexuality and identity and the necessary analytic “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur, 1970) for each of her patient's attempts at a self-cure. For