ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the question of sexual perversions, but embedded in the thinking of all the authors is recognition that sexual experience can be variously motivated by intimate connection or defensive sexualization, sexuality as love and sexuality as perversion. The book also focuses on psychoanalytic gender theories, which have undergone profound changes in recent decades, often spurred by feminist theory and new openness to homosexuality as a normal variant of sexuality. The focus of this new openness has of necessity been first on shedding bias and automatic assumptions of pathology, and less on the sexuality in homosexuality or heterosexuality. Many psychoanalysts have emphasized that normative development requires our universal bisexuality to undergo a mourning process as we work toward acceptance of monosexuality, forced by the reality-based recognition of the difference between the sexes.
