"Human sexuality is inherently traumatic." Thus begins this fascinating psychoanalytic study. As Joyce McDougall convincingly demonstrates, the psychic conflicts arising from the tensions between the inner world of primitive instinctual drives and the constraining and denying forces of the external world begin in earliest infancy and have ramifications throughout life.

Consequently, psychoanalysis has a specific contribution to make to the study of aberrations in core gender, as well as to the understanding of psychic conflict concerning sexual identity and the quest for love.