THE MERMAID AND THE MINOTAUR: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise

by Dorothy Dinnerstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 1976

That Freud's insights are still revolutionary--whatever his Victorian limitations--is never clearer than when he has as worthy an heir as psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein. Freud's vision of our prolonged infancy as a time of physical helplessness and omnipotent fantasy, erotic bliss and cannibalistic rage, is central to Dinnerstein's brilliant, dogged, difficult enterprise: linking neurotic sexuality to ecological catastrophe and urging deep revision of human arrangements. But Dinnerstein goes beyond Freud (and her other mentors Norman O. Brown, Simone de Beauvoir, and Melanie Klein) in her startling central point: that both the mutual psychic crippling of the sexes and the death-denying, life-destroying juggernaut of ""progress"" have their origin in the fact that our violent infant ambivalence--prototype for the human ambivalence toward life itself--is always directed toward a woman. From this obvious fact Dinnerstein derives in exhaustive detail the neurotic symbiosis between men and women, ""each sex in its. own way sub-human."" But she argues cogently that the female monopoly of early child care is by no means the biological given we assume it is. Rather it stems from historical necessities which have now become obsolete. Dinnerstein is most concerned to understand why, then, we have not rushed to change sexual and parental roles. She concludes that we have a deep emotional investment in the status quo, not only because it fulfills real needs in its twisted way, but also because women's availability as scapegoat lets us avoid facing and integrating out radical ambivalence toward both bodily life and ""enterprise."" Dense, urgent, repetitively argued, this will repay slow, careful reading with a sense of the poetry and paradox of life--and the human responsibility for survival.

Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION