'This is a study of sexual excitement. It is the fifth book - perhaps more accurately, the fifth chapter in one work - on masculinity and femininity (gender identity), carrying forward ideas examined in my last book, Perversion. The other four books are: Sex and Gender: the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, The Transsexual Experiment, Splitting: A Case of Female Masculinity and Perversion: The Erotic form of Hatred. As many have noted since Freud said it decades ago, it is so difficult to draw a line between excitement one can call "perverse" and normal excitement that the word "normal" loses definition.'- From the Introduction by the Author
This book aims to show that the function of day-dreams is to state a problem that has been disguised and then to solve it, the problem and the solution being the poles between which excitement flows.
