While the jacket copy suggests a self-help title, this latest book from Person (The Sexual Century) is really a history of theories of power, as revealed through close readings of psychoanalytic theory, literature and popular culture. According to Person, a physician and professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, Western culture is enamored of a "pornography of power"—in love with images of dominance and subordination. But really, she argues, power works more subtly. According to Person, there are two major kinds of power: interpersonal (the kind we exert over others, or feel exerted over ourselves) and personal (the kind we experience as strength, self-confidence and, in trendy parlance, "empowerment"). Drawing, with varying degrees of efficacy, on sources as diverse as Freud, The Sopranos, Eugene O'Neill, Hannah Arendt and Edith Wharton, Person's book seeks to explain why we are relentlessly seduced by the image of holding power over others and less able to draw on its strength for ourselves. She argues that intimacy and power are not, as we generally like to believe, mutually exclusive, but rather interdependent, as evidenced in both everyday personal relationships and––in its most explicit form–– sado-masochistic ones. Person is at her best when musing on less obvious exercises of power, such as the tense, ambivalent power relations that exist between mother and child, or the way in which games like Pokémon allow kids, if only in the realm of make-believe, to experience the thrill of holding control over others. "Authentic power," she writes, "is the ability to live fully, with few regrets and fewer recriminations"—a sentiment readers may welcome in a world where corporate and political recriminations are common by-products of power. (Oct.)
