Sexuality, Intimacy, Power

Can contemporary psychoanalysis tell us anything about sexuality that is new and clinically meaningful?

It most certainly can, answers Muriel Dimen in this work, which seeks to revive Freud's root interest in "sexual impulses" in the ordinary sense of the term.

Drawing on feminism, postmodernism and contemporary relational theory, Dimen takes a sustained and irreverent look at hallowed assumptions about psychosexuality.

For her, the paradigm shift from dualism to multiplicity that has reshaped a range of disciplines must now be brought to bear on our thinking about sexuality.

We must return to the open-mindedness hiding between the lines and buried in the footnotes of Freud's writings, and thereby replace the determinism to which his thought gave rise with contemporary notions of contingency, paradox and thirdness.

By setting psychoanalysis, social theory and feminism in conversation - or rather, by unveiling the colloquy that has always taken place among them - Dimen challenges clinicians and academicians alike to rethink ideas about gender, eroticism and perversion. To this end, she explores, among other topics, the relations between lust and libido; the limitations of Darwinian In tune with currents of psychoanalytic and postmodern criticism, this text's medium is its message.

Dimen draws on a variety of disciplines and employs diverse literary styles to delineate the ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes that subtend sexuality in all its personal and clinical complexity.

Of special note is her interweaving of recent psychoanalytic contributions (emerging from both modern Freudian and relational traditions) with insights gleaned from contemporary philosophy and social theory.

Dimen's introductory essay historicizes her perspective and modes of expression in terms of the clinical, political and intellectual events of the 1960s and 1970s.