Abstract
The English translation of my book Seduction and Desire: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexuality since Freud was reviewed in JAPA 63/1 in February. The reviewer, Bradford Verter, seems disappointed that I wrote a book other than the one he expected: “From the title . . . one would expect to find . . . a comprehensive review of recent theoretical work on psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality” (p. 193). Yet I did try hard to provide just such an overview, not only of “recent theoretical work” but of psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality since Freud. The reviewer also finds fault with “three overly long chapters” (p. 193), though that doesn’t exactly seem excessive given that my survey is of a good century’s worth of theorizing. Worse, the reviewer claims the author made “her own contribution to the subject” (p. 193)—but what else should one expect of an author? A clear or consistent line of argument does not seem one of the reviewer’s strengths, since only four lines after mentioning his expection that he would be reading about “recent theoretical work,” he complains about “synthetic reading” and a lack of “original research or casework” (p. 193). It is hard to do justice to such contradictory expectations. This carping tone, a mixture of ignorance and insinuation, unfortunately pervades this review.
However, as this is a theoretical presentation of my ideas, it is crucial they be represented clearly, which I do not feel the review has done.
In the book, I reconstruct exemplary positions in the psychoanalytic discourse on sexuality and gender, starting with Freud and the analysts of the second generation, and extend this up to current relational positions. In so doing, I focus on the question of the genesis of sexuality, the relationship between sexuality and Geschlecht (sex/gender), and the issue of sexual preference. My goal is to provide a critique of heteronormative conceptualization, as well as to formulate a consistent, nonnormative theory of sexuality that, using psychoanalytic arguments, questions the conventional categorization of masculine and feminine sexuality, as well as of homosexuality and heterosexuality. The reviewer unfortunately does not address this theoretical approach and instead rather arbitrarily picks out individual aspects—not infrequently twisting my arguments to say the exact opposite of what I intended. One can see this particularly in his assertion that “Quindeau claims that interactions with adults cannot traumatize children in a clinical sense, because authorities have instructed us that trauma comprises ‘a triad of intrusion, denial, and arousal,’ and she thinks it unlikely that such responses might be manifested in a prepubescent child. For me at least, the clinical and ethical implications of such a repudiation of childhood experience are rather troubling” (p. 195).
This assertion is the opposite of what I believe, and the entire book provides evidence that this is a severe misreading if not misunderstanding. Indeed, it is hard to see the assertion as grounded in what I wrote, so I scarcely know where to begin in responding. Since Freud’s earliest writings, the psychoanalytic notion of psychic trauma has focused on the ongoing, complex interaction between the “internal” and the “external” and, typically, on the need for two different “moments” to create a psychic trauma, which is to say a trauma that may lead to repression and pathology. Freud’s earliest work on sexual traumas makes clear that the meaning of such traumas will change after puberty. Neither Freud nor I—nor anyone I can think of— believes that “interactions with adults cannot traumatize children in a clinical sense” or, indeed, in any other sense.
In addition, the reviewer does not seem all that familiar with the state of psychoanalytic theory, as can be seen in his misrepresentation of Laplanche’s work. His attribution to Laplanche (and perhaps to me) of the idea that “a child’s encounter with the adult world results in enigmatic messages” is particularly striking (p. 194). For more than forty years, Laplanche emphasized that what is enigmatic in adult-infant communication comes strictly from the adult. For Laplanche, the adult’s communications in the attachment situation are compromised by the adult’s own sexual unconscious and thus, like a parapraxis, are enigmatic to the adult himself. They are thus necessarily, but only secondarily, enigmatic to the infant. It is the residues of the failure to translate these enigmatic messages from the adult that create the unconscious. Laplanche calls this “primal repression,” and his writing—including works that have been in English translation since 1999—is completely clear on this point.
Last but not least, the reviewer favors an abundantly naive empiricist understanding of research if he promotes the view that case studies can buttress the theory. My doing without case studies in the book follows far more the widespread insight in French psychoanalysis that they can at best be only illustrative. Nevertheless, the arguments in my book are based on twenty years of clinical experience with intensive psychoanalysis. The apparent lack of substance the reviewer attributes to the book seems therefore due to a reading that was at once both overcasual and injudicious.
JAPA is an important journal, and not just for anglophone psychoanalysis. A letter to the editor published online cannot hope to correct the harm done to my book by the misleading statements that litter this review. I would have liked a reviewer who, if he or she agrees to take on a book like mine, would show a curiosity and openness to the work of Laplanche and European psychoanalysis. That is where my own theorizing begins. As Otto Kernberg notes on the back cover of my book, “recent psychoanalytic and psychosocial studies of human sexuality . . . have lacked an overall, integrative conceptualization [of sexual behavior]. This volume is . . . an integrative psychoanalytic model that bridges American and European contributions . . .”.