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.
Reproduced on the jacket of this book is what appears to be a medieval print (I did not see the source stated in the book) of great charm. In a garden, a nude but androgynous Adam and Eve are seated at the feet of a saint-like Creator, robed, unbearded, and equally androgynous. Thus, one of the most significant points of the book is played out for the reader before the book is even opened—that certain themes and styles of life formerly relegated to the symbolic or the artistic, are now overtly enacted and sanctioned.
The twelve original essays in the book have been brought together to explore the relationship the following six aspects of modern life have to each other, to psychoanalysis, to culture, and to men and women. They are:
1. denial of unconscious processes
2. sexual alienation between men and women
3. increase of homosexuality, sexual variations, group sex and paradoxically, sexual apathy
4. a new diagnostic category, or minority group—the transsexual
5. the new feminist movement and the dissolution of traditional sex roles and life styles
6. the erosion of differences, values, and cultural context.
To this end the editors have divided the book into three sections, an opening historical perspective followed by theoretical and clinical topics. The pitfalls of such an edited book are, it seems to me: (1) that there may be an uneven quality of the contributions, (2) a failure in cohesiveness to the stated aims of the book, and (3) a failure to maintain objectivity on issues that have a political nature. My reading of the book was reassuring on all points, that the authors have come up with that rara avis a well thought-out and integrated edited book that weaves the efforts of a dozen good minds into an arresting intellectual tapestry for the reader.
A word on the contributors. Some will be known to the psychoanalytically informed reader: Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Martin Grotjahn, Judith Kestenberg, Robert Seidenberg, and Natalie Shainess. Some who were new to me, alth