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This is a timely and important book. Elise's thesis posits sexuality as a central factor in psychoanalysis. Its disappearance has been gradual. Freud made it pivotal to his concerns and maintained its centrality through his theoretical work. Nonetheless, after his death, other theoretical perspectives emerged and sexuality was minimized (e.g., object relations theory, self-psychology, relational turn). Fonagy (2008) demonstrated the curtailment of general interest in sexuality by investigating the clinical narratives in our field through PEP-CD-ROM. He highlighted the reduced use of such terms as sensual, sexual experiences, as well as lessened commentary on sexual body parts and psychosexuality. Such terms as affection, affiliation, connection, and relatedness were in the ascendancy instead.
Elise's writing is in reply to those who have downgraded sexuality. There is much in this book that successfully argues for the inclusion of the concepts of sexuality and gender in our clinical endeavors. Elise suggests there has been a continued minimization of female sexuality and gender, both culturally and psychoanalytically. She quotes Bassin (1982) who challenges the very language that psychoanalysts use which reduces women to traditional culturally informed roles as homemakers and reproducers. She cites Long (2005), who describes the phallocentric language “that shapes and confines thinking and perception.” Rather than genital inferiority, Elise comments, “females know and like their bodies, rather than experiencing themselves as failed males” (p. 165). She prefers language that doesn't only focus on the “incorporate interior quality of the vagina and uterus but on the expansive exterior of the female body,” meaning, for example, that the breasts “are the original phallic objects” … “the erect breasts and nipples” (p. 179). She also cites the pregnant body, which is full of external protrusions and, therefore, she wishes to appropriate “phallic” as a term that equally app