The Sexual Century. By Ethel Spector Person. New Haven, CT:  University Press, 1999,  387 pp.

This collection of many of Ethel Spector Person' papers on gender and sex spans a 25-year period, from 1973 to 1998. Most have been published before, but this does not detract from the value of the overall

cohesive sense of her thinking and the spirit of her adventurous and challenging work over the years that a volume such as this one conveys. During this time period, Person has been one of the major contributors to psychoanalytic thinking. Her moving dedication in memory of Lionel Ovesey, a coauthor on many male gender papers,“a friend, mentor, and collaborator in those days when men were said not to mentor women,” captures a nostalgia in reading this work of the 1970s and early 1980s when some insights, now taken for granted, were first articulated. For example, the reader realizes thankfully how far we have come not only in the change in sexual mores, but in the psychoanalytic considerations of gender. What a debt we owe to these authors who, with others such as Robert Stoller, and feminist author Nancy Chodorow, shepherded the psychoanalytic field along in, in spite of the distaste and reluctance of some purists in the ego psychological sphere of the profession, that is, those who refused to include and conceptualize the role of culture in psychic development for fear that it would distract from the scientific project and the psychoanalytic focus on intrapsychic explication. The range of papers here implicitly tells the tale of gradually cumulative and accepted insights. Contemporaty analysts can now freely describe the “sexualities” in the plural. Gender is acknowledged to be a complicated psychic construction that challenges any simple dichotomous notion of masculine versus feminine. This takes us away from any temptation to linear neatness in matching psychosexual phases with symptoms, inhibitions, anxiety, and personality formation.

Of course, while challenging Freud' too formulaic agenda for female development per se, Person' work does carry forth Freud'