Adrift in a love story without a psychoanalytic rudder: A response to “Permeable boundaries”

The comment reviews the rigid rules of psychoanalytic technique established by Freud and their grip on practice in the Heroic Period of psychoanalysis, despite the irony that Freud himself broke his own rules with abandon. Heinz Kohut made the conceptual transformations in the theory by placing empathy at the center of the project. Richard Geist and Meredith Nocek creatively extend this tradition in their work “Permeable boundaries: Therapeutic benefits.”

In writing the Metamorphoses Ovid took from his elegiac works not only many of the themes and stories, but also his attitudes and beliefs about many facets of human behaviour, particularly those relating to love. This influenced the manner in which he retold myth. The first chapter deals exclusively with the account of Apollo and Daphne and the manner in which it expresses in narrative form the poetic credo which had guided his elegiac work, for it is seen as a yardstick by which much of the work is to be measured. Chapters two and three discuss in detail the manner in which the attitudes towards rape and jealousy which Ovid expressed in his elegiac works influenced the relevant sections of the Metamorphoses. In the final chapter Ovid's attitude to love, as it is evidenced in several stories of mutual love in the Metamorphoses is discussed. The influential opinion of Otis, who sees a significant change in attitude from that exhibited in Ovid's elegiac works, seems to require some revision: Ovid does not seem to have changed his stance from his elegiac days. Although he does treat his subject more seriously, whimsy and humour still permeate this treatment.

Every 10 years from 1980 to 2010, students in a British Columbia university were surveyed about age of sexual initiation, number of partners, and degree of emotional intimacy within their partnerships. Between 1980 and 1990, the socially acceptable prerequisite for premarital sex appeared to shift from the promise of marriage to mutual love. This change was demonstrated by a fall in the virginity rate among unmarried females, and the rise of monogamous romantic relationships for males. From 1980 through 2010, men reported more sexual partners than did women, with a smaller, though rising, proportion of serious relationships. Since 1990, never-married students were classified into three sexual behavioural groups: monogamists (about 55%), abstainers (30%), and multi-partnered “experimenters” (20% of men throughout each decade, and 7.6% of women in 1990–2000, rising to 14.4% in 2010). Experimenters generally reported concurrent partners, most of them casual. Since 1980, most sexually active students have experienced both romantic relationships and casual sexual partnerships, yet since at least 1990, the majority have been primarily monogamous. This article traces the changes and continuities in romantic relationships, casual sex, and sexual behavioural groups over 30 years, concluding that contrary to the claims of popular media and some academics, casual sex (“hookup culture”) has not replaced romantic relationships as the most common form of student sexual behaviour.