Full Description
This book offers Dimen's classic take on psychosexuality, drawing on relational theory, feminism and postmodernism, with a new foreword by Virginia Goldner and Velleda Ceccoli honouring the late Muriel Dimen and introducing a new audience to her profound legacy.
For Dimen, the shift from dualism to multiplicity that has reshaped a range of disciplines can also be brought to bear on our thinking about sexuality. She urges us to return to the open-mindedness hiding between the lines and buried in the footnotes of Freud's writings, and to replace the determinism into which his thought has hardened with more fluid notions of contingency, paradox, and thirdness. By unveiling the colloquy among psychoanalysis, social theory, and feminism, Dimen challenges clinicians and academicians alike to rethink ideas about gender, eroticism, and perversion. She explores, among other topics, the relations between lust and libido; the limitations of Darwinian thought in theorizing homosexuality; the body as projective test; and the intimate tangle of love and hate between women. Generous clinical examples illustrate the ways in which a radical re-visioning of psychosexuality benefits therapists and patients alike.
A brilliant example of contemporary psychoanalytic theory at its destabilizing best, Sexuality, Intimacy, Power covers both clinical insights and theoretical rethinking that is invaluable for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students of women's, gender and queer studies.
Contents
Acknowledgements Foreword Prologue: A Personal Journey from Dualism to Multipliicity Part 1: The Story So Far: Psychoanalysts, Feminism and Politics 1. The Engagement Between Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Report from the Front 2. The Third Step: Freud, the Feminists, and Postmodernism Part 2: Mind, Body, Culture: Psychoanalytic Studies 3. On "Our Nature" or Sex and the Single Narrative 4. The Body as Rorschach 5. Between Lust and Libido: Sex, Psychoanalysis and the Moment Before 6. Deconstructing Difference: Gender, Splitting and Transitional Space Part 3: The Personal Is Political Is Theoretical: A Sampler 7. Power, Sexuality, and Intimacy 8. In the Zone of Ambivalence: A Feminist Journal of Competition 9. Perversion Is Us? Eight Notes Epilogue: Some Personal Conclusions
