A study of Hans Bellmer's eroticized images and the psychological origins of his disturbing art. Bellmer (1902-1975), best known for his life-size pubescent dolls, devoted an artistic lifetime to sexualized images of the female body, distorted, dismembered or menaced in sinister scenarios. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Sue Taylor suggests why he was driven by erotomania as well as by a desire for revenge, suffering and the safety of the womb. Styling himself as the quintessential Oedipal son in perpetual rebellion against a despised father, Bellmer was, she argues, more ambivalent than he could consciously allow: she traces a repressed homoerotic attachment to the father, castration anxiety and an unconscious sense of guilt, and proposes that a feminine identification informs all the disquieting aspects of his art. Taylor goes beyond the dolls and their photographs of the 1930s to the explicit prints, drawings, paintings and photographs of the following three decades.