Portnoy's Complaint

Author(s): Philip Roth

Fiction

Portnoy's Complaint n. after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift f r Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.


 


With a new Afterword by the author for the 25th Anniversary edition.


Product Information

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral." In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 "The Plot Against America" received the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004." Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize.

IN

General Fields

  • : 9780679756453
  • : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • : Vintage
  • : 0.208652
  • : 31 August 1994
  • : 210mm X 133mm X 18mm
  • : United States
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Philip Roth
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 813/.5/4
  • : 304