BOOK REVIEWS

THE MANY FACES OF EROS: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human

Sexuality, by Joyce McDougall, New York: W.W. Norton, 1995, 257 pp.,
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$30.00.
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Reviewed by
Donna Bassin, PhD
Independent Practice

The Many Faces of Ems is an occasion for new readers of Joyce

McDougall to discover her invaluable contributions on neosexualities,
addictions, somatizations, and creative sublimations. McDougall has ex-
tended 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 suspi-
cion" (Ricoeur, 1970) for each of her patient's attempts at a self-cure. For

Donna Bassin, PhD, independent practice, New York, New York.

Correspondence concerning this review should be addressed to Donna Bassin,
PhD, 31 West 11 th Street, 5C, New York, New York 10011. Electronic mail may be sent
to dibassin@aol.com.

Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1998, Vol. 15, No. 3, 428-434

Copyright 1998 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 0736-9735/9TO.OO

428
 BOOK REVIEWS 429

McDougall, growing up human requires managing the concrete reality of

sexual limits, the actual boundedness of self, the differences between the
generations, and our own inevitable death. She argues that the trauma of
becoming human means coming to grips with one's monosexual destiny,
which "constitutes one of childhood's most severe narcissistic wounds"
(p. xi). Yet human sexuality, in all its manifestations, must be understood
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individually as representing the best possible solution created by the child

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of the past to the conflicts of these inherent traumas and "in the face of
contradictory parental communications concerning core gender identity,
masculinity, femininity, and [the] sexual role" (p. 179). According to
McDougall, subjectivity and sexual identity arise from the various solu-
tions to mourning "the impossible wish to be and to have both sexes"
(p. 11). However (and here again is a tension-inducing paradox), McDou-
gall wants us to keep in mind that the resolution of these universal traumas
is never fully accomplished and that all of us deny that in some part of our
psyche we are "blessedly free to be omnipotent, bisexual and immortal"
(p. xv).
McDougall pushes to the foreground an expanded and rehabilitated
appreciation of Eros. She resituates Eros as a reparative and creative
self-preserving drive in the development of all psychic solutions to the
inherently traumatic aspects of growing up human. Her grasp of the
survival aspects of Eros, extending beyond a Darwinian biological frame
of reproduction and preservation, has her taking issue with Freud's concept
of the repetition compulsion as exclusively serving the death drive.
In this book, McDougall builds on Freud's work on the universal
presence of psychic bisexuality and the importance of the primal scene as
basic organizing functions of the psyche, and rescues psychic bisexuality
from its culturally bound equation with pathology and relocates it as part of
the everyday human experience. She deconstructs its meaning and extends
the range of its unconscious significance in psychic life. She suggests that
although the conflictual aspects of bisexual wishes may create neurotic
suffering, they also provide psychic enrichment. Moreover, although
bisexual wishes can appear to have been dealt with through repression or
sublimation, breakdown is always likely to occur, giving rise to creative
inhibitions.
The primal scene for McDougall, idiosyncratically, refers to the
entire unconscious knowledge and personal mythology of human sexual
relations and accompanying wishes of the child to possess both parents and
the imagined power of each. This scene for McDougall is not just played
out genitally with phallic oedipal conflicts, but it can be depicted in
 430 BOOK REVIEWS

pregenital terms as well. It is within this broadened perspective that she

stresses both the body as a site of knowledge and as a medium of thought.
She argues that archaic primal scene fantasies are expressed in psychoso-
matic disturbances, neosexualities, and neurotic symptomology, as well as
in sublimatory activities. What is crucial for McDougall's scheme is the
internalization of a symbolic representation of the complementarity of the
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two sexes. Archaic primal scene material (including the child's fantasies of
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the parent's relationships to each other) transformed into symbolic mental

representations can become, according to McDougall, a "psychic acquisi-
tion." This acquisition is the dialogical function of thinking.
McDougall connects her "chapters" with an underlying attention to
the ways the self accepts (or not) and then compensates for this knowledge
of loss and incompleteness with an accompanying hatred and destructive-
ness toward introjected primary objects. Her clinical examples point to the
varieties of restaging within the universe of addictive sexualities, psycho-
somatic illness, neosexual solutions, and deviant heterosexualities and
homosexualities, which attempt to eliminate the traumatic aspects of the
primal scene and monosexuality. All solutions to psychoses or psychic
death constitute gaps in the patients' communication. Some are more
obviously successful than others (in managing affective distress or in
complying with social norms), but they all reflect an attempt to contain and
manage the rage and anxiety of loss and exclusion. Although all these
solutions are an attempt at self-cure to the degree that they are a somatic
solution rather than a psychological one, they can only be temporary, dead,
and repetitive.
Other than parental support in the broadest sense, McDougall does
not have much to say about the variables that differentiate her patients'
specific solutions. In light of her attention to the mind-body matrix and the
task of managing rage and anxiety, one would hope for more of her
thoughts, for example, on temperament, neurological stability, and develop-
ment regarding affective experiences and regulation. A consideration of the
constifutional-maturational variations in the growing child's ability, for
example, to process and regulate affect and sensory input, might refine
McDougall's efforts to differentiate among the varieties of possible sym-
bolic solutions to growing up human.
McDougall finds in the blanks in analytic discourse, and the less
attended aspects of patients' communication (e.g., their medical history), a
lack of imagination to create an illusion in the space that separates one
from another and thus supports absence. In this gap between lost object and
the capacity to symbolize freely, she finds a preverbal language or somatic
 BOOK REVIEWS 431

events and enactment. We do not have a developed understanding of this

language, perhaps because, as McDougall says here, we have focused too
much on the words of the father, particularly in looking at primitive states.
This reverence for language as the sole valid container for understanding
the psychoanalytic process, McDougall speculates, may be the "legacy of
a paternalistic religion" ("In the beginning was the word"), for in the
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beginning there was the voice, sounds, and rhythmic beating. Her attention
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to the solutions beyond a father-oriented reality—which has privileged

rationality, renunciation, self-control, and self-cohesion—in coming to
accept separations places her with another French analyst, Julia Kristeva,
in the attempt to moderate the brutal Raven, who can only say nevermore
to the Foes in search of a solution to loss.
McDougall provides her readers with more than an explication of the
contents of her clinical interchanges and her most recent interrogations of
theoretical psychoanalysis. She presents a critique of, or a context for, her
readings of her patients. Although they ultimately cannot be separated and
McDougall does not privilege one over the other, her last two chapters give
the most direct and effective rendering of her schema of psychoanalytic
values. She acknowledges that her perspective of "self cure in the face of
conflict and the obligation to find solutions to the difficulties of being
human" as being the purpose of psychological symptoms, inhibitions, and
sexual deviations is a value, that "all analysts would not give her concep-
tion a dominant position"; and further that she "must make allowances for
its potentially deviating effect on [her] own thinking and practice" (p. 239).
In stating such, she is asking us, her readers, to appreciate her writing and
clinical work as her best possible solutions to the problem of the pain,
despair, and suffering of her patients.
In the spirit of an ongoing attempt to expand the scope of analysis,
McDougall's clinical freedom and creativity do have an underlying logic.
She holds the conviction that despite a patient's despair (and unconscious
refusal to be helped), early traumatic distress can be alleviated. McDougall
does offer an attempt to be the mother (a mother who has accepted and
integrated her psychic bisexuality) who brings language to the child and
meaning to preverbal bodily experiences, emotional states, and fantasies.
The task of this analyst-mother is thus to create, with the analysand—
using the here-and-now transference—a glossary for translating this bio-
logic into a psycho-logic, finally enabling the psychosomatic expressive
body to become a symbolic one.
Taking off, perhaps, from her last statement in Plea for a Measure of
Abnormality (McDougall, 1980), where she writes that "no analyst,
 432 BOOK REVIEWS

according to Freud (1910/1957) may hope to take his patients beyond the
point at which he can no longer put himself in question" (1978, p. 48),
McDougall puts psychoanalysis and the psychoanalyst into question here
in her last two chapters ("Deviations in the Psychoanalytic Attitude" and
"Beyond Psychoanalytic Sects in Search of a New Paradigm"). Similar to
the symptomatic individual who becomes uncreative and rigid when links
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between body and mind are disavowed and immediate positions are not
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supported by current life (a new analytic observation), psychoanalysis

must continue to combat conventionalist assumptions.
One could, and I am sure many will, take issue with certain of
McDougall's theoretical assumptions and find contradictions, as she her-
self succumbs at times, as we all do, to breakdowns in creative sublimatory
functioning, to departures from the ideal of impartiality, to less symbolic
and more concrete thinking, to countertransference intrusions, the imposi-
tion of her own values, and sexual preferences. McDougall has been much
criticized for her comments on lesbian sex as being fictive and illusory
(insofar as it is inconsistent with biologically given gender). To be
consistent with her observations about the plurality of solutions to the
trauma of differences, any one overgeneralization in understanding female
homosexualities must be questioned. McDougall does reconsider her prior
overly homogenous and limited picture of female homosexuality in this
volume. Although some of her clinical examples demonstrate masculine
identifications in the wish to become the father, or a failure to take
possession of the mother's female prerogative, she does remind the reader
that these cases are self-selected samples by those who requested relief
from their suffering from her in particular. Maintaining her position that
same-sex desires may signal compensatory structures, she suggests that all
psychic experiences depend on the imaginary, and thus this perspective
must be even-handedly applied to cross-sex desires as well. Although her
use of the pluraT'-ies" to our sexual orientation classification system
(heterosexualities, homosexualities, and autosexualities) suggests a consid-
eration for the unique experience of each person's sexuality, the underlying
link between object choice and sexuality must be further deconstructed. If
the goal of any analysis, as she suggests, is to deconstruct the limited
constraints of any solution—albeit with empathy and compassion for its
presence—what needs to be analyzed is not only object choice but also
those inhibitions that interfere with a full and active Eros. To this end,
McDougall, hoping to address the lack of sexual desire in certain lesbian
relations, finds in her patients fears and fantasies of bodily damage and
disintegration of self. Similarly concerned about the meaning of this erotic
 BOOK REVIEWS 433

diminution, Schwartz (1996) suggested that in "lesbian bed death," de-

creases in libido may be a function of fear of ruthlessness or suppression of
aggression in certain couples.
McDougall remains embedded in her own "symptomatic" sexual
solution. Yet to the extent that she attempts to illuminate this very
limitation, she contributes to our attempts as analysts to imagine alternative
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sexualities. The separation of our observations regarding homosexualities

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from heterosexual logic is as clinically necessary as has been our separa-

tion of our understanding of feminine sexuality from masculine param-
eters. McDougall contributes to the current conversations about gender
theory hi a number of ways, bringing a different tone than she has had
before. Her reminder of the necessity of impartiality in our clinical work
underlines the necessity for analyst to explore the infantile roots and
defensive functions equally for all sexualities. Her elaborations of Freud's
thoughts on psychic bisexuality, her concern for the variety of fates for the
homosexual libido, and her notion of sexualities as a solution to loss rather
than to the demands of reproduction and convention place her theoretically
along the leading edge of the current resistance in gender theory. This
revised gender theory has questioned the privileging of genital sex and
heterosexuality as an optimal and even necessary solution. McDougall
herself has not directly applied her own theoretical organizers to the
elaboration of a flexible subjective and sexual identity that includes
cross-gender identifications regardless of biological sex. However, she
illuminates the concretizing tendencies that have, unfortunately, led us to
equate sexual differences within mental contents to differences between
actual sexed bodies.
The questions raised by her work point to directions that may be
useful to follow. We have a limited understanding of how the erotic
connections to the maternal object are sublimated as well as how female
heterosexuals transform this original tie to their relationship to men.
Furthermore, although McDougall views "human sexuality [as] inherently
traumatic" (p. ix) this can also be seen as dictated by a traditional
ideological construct taken for real.
This volume is a valuable platform at the very time in psychoanalytic
history that the field is most hi need of tolerating ambiguity, uncertainty,
and paradox rather than having recourse to splitting and rigidification. The
search for common ground or even for a complementary relationship
between the various schools of thought within psychoanalysis may be a
search itself for the nonexistent phallus. McDougall's appreciation of
human meaning and sexuality as indefinite plural allows for a relational
 434 BOOK REVIEWS

universe as well as a modern Freudian one. American readers, influenced

by a medical model, might err and bring ideas of health or pathology to
McDougall's patients, which have more to do with our own "adaptive
ego" readings than what is actually written. (See Rosen and Zickler, 1996,
for an interesting discussion regarding differences between French and
American perspectives.) At times, McDougall's writing takes on an air of a
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patients' rights advocate, which one hopes is unnecessary for practitioners

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in our field. Still, perhaps her reminder of our task is necessary given the
strains of working with our less symbolically able patients.

References

Freud, S. (1957). Future prospects of psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.),

The standard edition of the complete psychological works ofSigmund Freud (Vol.
11, pp. 139-151). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1910)
McDougall, }. (1980). A plea for a measure of abnormality. New York: International
Universities Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Rosen, H., & Zickler, E. (1996). Feminist psychoanalytic theory: American and French
reactions to Freud. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 46, 71-92.
Schwartz, A. (1996). It's a queer universe: Some notes erotic and otherwise. Psycho-
analysis and Psychotherapy, 2, 160-173.