The many faces of Eros: A psychoanalytic exploration of human sexuality.

Abstract

is an occasion for new readers of Joyce McDougall to discover her invaluable contributions on neosexualities, addictions, somatizations, and creative sublimations. McDougall has extended 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 suspicion" (Ricoeur, 1970) for each of her patient's attempts at a self-cure. For

Don?t You Know Me? Mutual Recognition in a Case of Mistaken Identity

“…As a response to the unfolding of the events in the treatment, the patient's ''violent allergic reaction of unknown origin'' may have been a potentially dangerous, physiological explosion of something he could not psychologically metabolize (McDougall, 1995). At the same time, the patient deliberately brought it into the therapeutic space, offering it as a potential communication to another human being, and so allowed more of himself to be seen and shared.…”

‘Limits to therapy and counselling’: Deconstructing a professional ideology

“…Perhaps the very way in which therapy QS a PTF is structured (rather than the particular features of psychoanalysis per se) may actually encourage and actively produce client infantilisation and dependency through the deep unconscious dynamics triggered by the PTF, often buttressed by the assumptive framework typically embraced by the professional 'Limits to therapy and counselling' 381 therapist (cf. McDougall, 1995). As one of the ex-clients in Alexander's book Folie u Deux remarks: 'It doesn't seem to matter whether the therapist encourages [dependence] or discourages it.…”

“…Spinelli's epigraph at the start of this paper), and the field has recently been described as being in a state of (theoretical) disarray (Erwin, 1997, p. 2). More generally still, some commentators have been starting to challenge the epistemological relevance of theory (and its associated form of 'technical' knowledge) to the healing 'Limits to therapy and counselling' 383 practice of therapy (Craib, 1987;McDougall, 1995;Riikonen & Smith, 1997), as new-paradigm epistemologies begin to challenge head on the ideology of modernity and its narcissistic preoccupation with ego, control, technocratic science and the material.…”

German dominatrices’ choices of working names as reflections of self-constructed social identity

“…This is interesting, as it corresponds with certain psychoanalytic theories of fetishism and sadomasochism, which view them as the destruction or death of an existing reality and the creation of a new one. For example, the French psychoanalyst Jeanne Chasseguet-Smirgel (1991) is the foremost proponent of the view that fetishism and sadomasochism constitute a destruction of reality, while the American analyst Joyce McDougall (1995) talks about them more in terms of creativity, coining the term "neosexualities." Within Kleinian theory, creativity is explicitly viewed as arising from a need to undo destruction (Glover, 1998, Chapter 2 and 3), and the name Phoenix seems particularly apt in this respect.…”