Sexual States of Mind

A Kleinian revision of Freud's theory of sexuality. Rather than describing sexual behaviour, Meltzer treats sexuality metapsychologically, reading sexual life as a set of states of mind organised by internal object relations, with unconscious phantasy and the primal scene at the centre. Adult sexuality, in this account, rests on identification with the internal combined parents. It is set apart from the polymorphous sexuality of the infantile self, and both are set apart from the perverse and addictive states in which destructive parts of the self attack the internal parental couple. Later chapters carry this structural theory into tyranny, the relation between the generations, education, the psychic reality of unborn children, pornography, adolescence and the perversion of the transference. Its publisher singles out its use for understanding perversions and addictions.