Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy's Complaintn.[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 fur 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.

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for <b>Patrimony</b> (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for <b>Operation Shylock</b> (1993), the National Book Award for <b>Sabbath's Theater</b> (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for <b>American Pastoral</b> (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for <b>I Married a Communist</b> (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for <b>The Counterlife</b> (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, <b>Goodbye, Columbus</b> (1959). In 2000 he published <b>The Human Stain</b>, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological eth