Sex and the Psyche: The Untold Story of Our Most Secret Fantasies Taken from the Largest Ever Survey of Its Kind (review)

One of the most enduring misconceptions about psychoanalysis is that it is sex-obsessed. While inaccurate, this view is also not entirely without substance. Starting in the mid-1890s, Freud began to pour out a cornucopia of views on human nature absolutely drenched in sexuality: Oedipus, Dora, transference love, polymorphous perversity, penis envy, childhood urges and fantasies, and, of course, that pugnacious seduction theory.

To this day, popular mythology has it, psychoanalysts continue to niggle and nit over every slip, pause, tic, or dream, forever on the hunt for all things sexual. This misguided and simplistic view (though it is equally a verdant and telling social fantasy holding fascinating insights about the mores and anxieties of our time) has settled into a festering mound of compost, incessantly thrown up as the Ur-book-jacket-image for all things psychoanalytic.

Perhaps you have your own version of what I semi-affectionately call the "cocktail-party reaction" to being asked what I do. The torrent of associations commonly produced when I respond that I am a psychoanalyst, were I working rather than trying to enjoy crudités and a goblet of Pinot Noir, would be material enough for the entire first phase of a treatment: You're examining everything I'm saying and doing right now like with x-ray glasses, and thinking I want to sleep with my mother and kill my father, right? You probably think everybody's gay or some sort of pervert and just in denial about it, right? All you ever think about is sex, right?

As a professional group, psychoanalysts have not worked very effectively to redress these (and other) misperceptions. The brief episodes when psychoanalysis enjoyed some measure of relatively wide social acceptability, even caché, notwithstanding, it is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as embattled, misunderstood, and underutilized as ever, at least in the United States. That this should be so is, consistent with such cornerstone psychoanalytic concepts as overdetermination and multiple function, both utterly sensical and deeply confounding.

None of this, of course, will be news to the readers of American Imago. Nor is it controversial to recall that over the past 100 years many theorists have contributed to, elaborated, and clarified Freud's original raw and dazzlingly innovative ideas about sex and sexuality. But outside of our profession, Freud and subsequent generations of psychoanalysts are usually not the sources of choice for information about these topics. Rather, most people might first think of Kinsey (and even so, probably not from his actual research but by way of Hollywood's cinematic portrayal of him). There are even people glancingly aware of Krafft-Ebing or Masters and Johnson. But to a populace more familiar with media-hyped personages such as Dr. Ruth, Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, and the legion of ersatz sexperts whose how-to-guides glut the real and virtual shelves of mass market book stores, serious contemporary psychoanalytic writers such as Robert Stoller (1985), Martin Bergmann (1991), and Ethel Person (1988) (to specify only a few) are likely to yield no more than a vacant stare.

To all of this comes an unlikely champion. Who is the new Wotan of psychoanalysis? An American expatriate in London, and regular contributor to this journal, named Brett Kahr. If he is not a superhero in the classic leaping-tall-buildings or thwarting demented-archvillains mold, upon reading his smart and tremendously engaging (though Viagra-titled) book, Sex and the Psyche: The Untold Story of Our Most Secret Fantasies Taken from the Largest Ever Survey of Its Kind, I am convinced he brings to bear another, altogether important skill-set. He is, not least, eminently capable of bridging the false but well-established divide between serious research-based scholarship and comprehensible, accessible writing about a difficult and complex subject.

That subject, the topic of Kahr...