Sex as Bait

This tour-de-force is an innovating, interdisciplinary treatment of sex and love, drawing on biology, mythology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy as well as on the author's own personality theory.

This tour-de-force is an innovating, interdisciplinary treatment of sex and love. It draws on biology, mythology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy as well as on the author's own personality theory, to construct a model of affective relationships between human beings. Shoham proposes a mother-based sexual development theory which includes a sexual typology arranged on a continuum that stretches from the starkly carnal Casanova to the romantically agonized Don Juan. Dramatic and literary illustrations abound. The “separant” Sisyphean Casanova tries to overcome the rift between himself and the object of his desire by the continuous conquest of female bodies; and the participant archetype Don Juan longs to be possessed by the ultimate woman, by being in love with love. While the exploits of these lovers are real, Shoham shows that their adventures have a deep mythical past and demonstrate major events in the developmental of the human personality. Sex As Bait offers a unique theoretical framework for the maternal proscription of incest, and relates this to the main role of women in the formation of the nuclear family and of human culture. On the psycho-cultural level Sex As Bait presents the development of sexual identity, both male and female, basing itself on a new approach of the oral development of the psyche. Shoham concludes the book with a challenging, if not disturbing, discussion of the sacred and profane aspects of love and their place in the development of human personality and culture.

Prof. Shlomo Giora Shoham was born in Lithuania in 1929 and immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1935. During Israel's War of Independence he served in the Nebi Daniel Convoy which was called in to help the Gush Etzion settlements. The bloc surrendered and he was captured by the Jordanians. Upon his release he started studying law at the Hebrew University and was among the first class to graduate from the Faculty of Law. He was later also the first to receive a PhD in law from the Faculty. He then went on to study criminology at Cambridge University in England, and upon his return to Israel founded the Institute of Criminology at the Bar-Ilan University. A decade later he founded the Department of Criminology at the Tel-Aviv University and is a teacher and scholar at the Faculty of Law till this day. Over the years he developed, with Prof. Yehuda Fried, a new method for treating drug-addicts, which was applied in Israel with impressive results. In his studies he examined social deviance and elaborated a unique personality theory to explain crime and deviation. His Stigma Theory, published in his book The Mark of Cain, which was translated into many languages, made it possible to understand the meaning of recidivism in the fields of crime and social deviance. In recent years he developed a new micro and macro theory in criminology. In his book Valhalla, Calvary and Auschwitz he proved that it is possible to explain the Nazi movement using a macro-criminological point of view, while the Holocaust may be understood from a macro-victimological aspect. His studies were published in numerous books and articles in the field of criminological theory and its application. As member of the Cohen Committee which was set up to discuss penal methods he dealt with the applicable aspects of criminological research for many years. His eldest son Giora was killed in the Yom Kippur War and Prof. Shoham has since added his son's name to his own. For his work he was awarded the Israel Prize in 2003.