Contains six essays and an introduction on Freudian and non-Freudian views of female sexuality. Contributors include Joyce McDougal, Maria Torok and Bela Grunberger.

These papers all examine the role of the Oedipus complex in the psyche and relates it to urgent issues of social and cultural life, historical and current.

This is an account of the psychoanalysis of creativity, pseudo-creativity and the perverse mind. The author explores art, film and literature.

Is today's thinking conditioned by body-mind dualism? A rebellion against the biological order seems to have silently infiltrated our world view. Suicide bombers appear to share a fascination with destruction with writers such as Mishima, Pasolini and Foucault. A liberation from the body to re-establish a possibly mystical union of soul and cosmos and an assertion of the mind's omnipotence appear to be common features of forms of behavior that seem to be taken for granted in contemporary thought. Is the new misogyny, which rejects motherhood in the name of feminism, contributing in any way to...

Once the ego-ideal is distinguished from the super-ego, it becomes possible to make sense of much that formerly remained obscure in psychoanalytic theory. Chasseguet-Smirgel illuminates not only the psychology of narcissism in individuals but many of the connections between psychic life and society.

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel versucht unter systematisch-theoretischen wie unter klinischen Gesichtspunkten das vieldeutige Konzept des Ichideals genauer zu fassen und dadurch unter anderem Phänomene wie Perversionen, Verliebtheit, die Bedeutung von Gruppen, die verschiedenen Formen von Kreativität oder die Rolle der Mitmenschen bei der Bewertung unseres eigenen Ichs besser zu verstehen.