The Casanova Complex: Compulsive Lovers and Their Women

by Peter Trachtenberg

Drawing on his own experiences and case histories, the author identifies the Casanova complex as a true compulsive disorder, defines six types of compulsive womanizers, and profiles the women who fall for Casanova types

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Relationships, Sexuality

283 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of the memoir 7 TATTOOS, THE BOOK OF CALAMITIES: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little Brown, August 2008), and ANOTHER INSANE DEVOTION (Da Capo, October 2012), a book about the search for a missing cat that's also an encoded exploration of love and marriage.

His essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, TriQuarterly, O, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR'S "All Things Considered."

Trachtenberg is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

He's the recipient of a NYFA artist's fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Whiting Writers Fellowship, a 2010 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a 2012 residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. The Book of Calamities was given the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award "for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity."

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very candidly written. The author himself shares his own personal insights recognized first hand through his own therapeutic process. This narrative, coupled with a study of male participants,addresses many of the key cognitive and emotional constructs that form the basis for intimacy issues in men exhibiting BPD and NPD traits. It is informally written,but eloquently so, and therefore an enjoyable read. Though the books publication date is older the material seems timely. The findings are in keeping with what psychology agrees is at the root of the push/pull dynamic of those with intimacy issues.

[Reenee Mc Knight · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a self help book. It helped me to divorce my husband.lol I was surprised to find it was a really a memoir. Still glad about divorce and I liked the book

[Libertine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Someone once recommended this book to me, telling me I’d see myself in its pages. While on a visit to a used bookstore awhile back, I saw the book on the shelf and said, “What the hell,” and decided to finally read it.

The book was written in the 1980s, at the height of the 12-Step self-help craze, when pop psychology books were seeing “codependency” behind every bush, asserting that ninety-six percent of all families were dysfunctional.

This book fit that mold precisely. It is a study of male libertines, whom the author called “Casanovas”, and identified himself as a “recovering Casanova”. He profiles six different types of Casanovas, whom he called hitters, drifters, romantics, nesters, jugglers, and tomcats.

The book is overly dramatic, written with a heavy hand of Freudian psychoanalytic psychobabble. Trachtenberg asserted that though the six types differed in their approaches to non monogamous sex, that they were all “sick” and had all come from dysfunctional families, outlining the form such families took in one chapter.

I got the strong impression that the author was leaning heavily on anecdotal evidence, drawing closely from his own experiences, and not any extensive research.

Though I saw bits of myself here and there in the various profiles, there wasn’t any one of the six types that was a real match. Nor did I come from a dysfunctional family -- I didn’t have an absent father, nor a shrewish mother.

Sometimes, though, a cigar is just a cigar, and some people are “Casanovas” simply because they like frequency and variety in their sex lives, not because they had a bad childhood. Trachtenberg admits as much at the end of the book when he wrote what amounted to a disclaimer:

“I am reluctant -- really unable -- to say what kind of sexual behavior is morally appropriate…I don’t doubt that some men and women legitimately prefer to lead active sex lives with many different partners…I wouldn’t want this book used as an argument for forced chastity or monogamy or as a nostalgic manifesto for the sexual mores of the 1950s…There is no such thing as a single code of righteous conduct in matters of the heart. A sexual ethic is something that each of us must choose for himself or herself, forging it through repeated trial and error, pleasure and heartache.”

[Harv Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suspect my own motives in reading this book. Was I trying to learn the secrets of how to sexually manipulate foxy women? Probably.

I marked the hell out of this book; underlines, margin marks; but not so I might scatter my seed; rather, as research: if I ever have an over-the-top-womanizer character in my novel, I can nail it! What? Was that a politically incorrect way to phrase it?

I was surprised at all the different "types" of compulsive lovers, and their different motivations.

And no, this book had ZERO EFFECT upon my Love Life.

Curiously, the only book that has had a positive, measurable improvement on my ability to "pick up chicks" is the book "SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN!" by Richard P. Feynman. But that's for another review.

@hg47