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This chapter describes a case involving severe sexual inhibition in a patient with narcissistic personality disorder. The case highlights how the analysis of oedipal conflicts gradually resolved a severe and extended inhibition of sexual desire that developed in the course of analytic treatment. The enactment in the countertransference of castration anxiety against which the patient was successfully defending himself by projective identification produced an extended stalemate, which was resolved once the countertransference was transformed into transference interpretations.

In the early 1960s John Clellon Holmes began to describe in his journals his sexual experiences in graphic detail. He wanted to become “whole again” by shedding the sexual inhibitions he believed were the cause of all human violence in the world. In an essay titled “Revolution Below the Belt,” which received Playboy’s Best Non-Fiction award in 1964, Holmes expressed his strong dissatisfaction with conventional attitudes toward sex and his desire for a “New Consciousness.” His journals reflected his desperate sense of loneliness and his obsessive physical desire, what he termed his “despair-become-lust.” Consistent with this obsession, Holmes found himself fantasizing a sexual experience, a ménage a trois, with both his wife Shirley and their neighbor, who previously had a brief affair with Alan Harrington. Yet he refused to acknowledge that his adventuring to the edge of eros had ruined his relationship with Shirley. Holmes also thought of writing a novel with an erotic theme, but was unable to finish the project.

This chapter presents two case histories on what is believed to be the major male complex in Indian (Hindu) culture, known as ‘maternal enthrallment’. Both cases give narrative life to the paradoxes of maternal enthrallment: the son's desire to get away from the mother and the fear of separation, the longing for a mother he hates, incestuous desire (and near-incestuous experiences) combined with the terror triggered by assertive female sexuality. This chapter shows that the mother's sexual stimulation of the boy is associated more with sexual inhibitions and dysfunctions than with genuine perversions of the kind documented in Western case histories.

This chapter discusses the blurred linguistic register of the plot in Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, and a commentary on its mode of writing that may be conceptualized through the tropes of syllepsis orzeugma (double governance), which represents marriage and adultery. The novel narrates the incestuous relationship between a billionaire and his daughter and their struggles to sustain their affair. Its style and structure can cause the reader to miss the main point of the plot. Also, its evidence of sexual inhibition is dissatisfying not only because it is preceded by psychological and crude means, but also because of the state-sponsored sanctions levied against any expressed desire outside procreative heterosexuality in the story.