This book examines the theories of female sexuality, using the Freudian and non-Freudian approach to the unconscious. It emphasise on what in the psychoanalytic image of man matters most. The book helps fill a long-apparent need for authoritative analyses in feminine psychology and sexual identity.

This book examines the role of the Oedipus complex in the psyche and relates it to urgent issues of social life, historical and current. It discusses the theory of sexual phallic monism and its most important consequences, and some essential points of Freud's work on female sexuality.

This book examines the theories of female sexuality, using the Freudian and non-Freudian approach to the unconscious. It emphasise on what in the psychoanalytic image of man matters most. The book helps fill a long-apparent need for authoritative analyses in feminine psychology and sexual identity.

This book examines the role of the Oedipus complex in the psyche and relates it to urgent issues of social life, historical and current. It discusses the theory of sexual phallic monism and its most important consequences, and some essential points of Freud's work on female sexuality.

What is the relationship between creativity and perversion? The boundary between the world of art and 'the artful universe of the pervert' is carefully explored in this study. Beyond the banal or picturesque variations in sexual behaviour, there lies an essential dimension of the human condition, a permanent temptation of the mind. It is the wish to escape our limitations, to replace our world with one where all things are possible. Led on by hubris, 'the artful universe' of perversion dethrones God-The-Father and rewrites the Bible. It aims to transmute reality, to revert to confusion and chaos. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel draws on a wide range of films, plays and writers - including de Sade, Oscar Wilde, and H.G. Wells. Examples from these sources are closely interwoven with clinical case material. Although the author does not conform to the classical analytic scheme, she reviews the psychoanalytic literature and remains faithful to Freud's thought. Emphasizing the relations between perversion, narcissism and idealization, she places the problem of perversion within the endless struggle of humanity against reality.

In this careful exposition of the concept of the ego ideal, the author explores the short cuts that are available to the psyche and traces the longer, more painful path to maturity. She develops in her own way Freud's view that people are forever seeking to regain a lost state of perfection, the state in which they were their own ideal - "primary narcissism." The book includes chapters on the following aspects of the ego ideal: perversion, genitality, being-in-love, groups, sublimation in the creative process, reality testing, and the superego.

Once the ego-ideal is clearly 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.