ABSTRACT
In a unique and original text, Oxenhandler provides some very compelling descriptions of the way parents can be attuned, or problematically misattuned, to their children's developing sexuality and its meanings. For many of the patients, the role of shared intimacy, pleasure, and an expression of noncoercive personal agency in sexuality has been obscured, if not obliterated. The pregenital sexuality, freed from entanglement is changed into genital sexuality capable of orgasm. Sexuality, which classical psychoanalysis privileged in the intrapsychic process, also plays a central role in the negotiation of relational interactions from the time of birth throughout the entire developmental experience, and in the creation of a sense of personal agency. Fathers have a role in the structuring of their children's sexuality as do mothers, from infancy through adolescence. Psychoanalysis, in its most essentially classical iteration, was preoccupied with the distortion and stunting of the individual's capacity for direct sexual expression and satisfaction unencumbered by deeply embedded conflicts from the past.
