Alexander Portnoy is a deeply neurotic Jewish lawyer and Portnoy's Complaint is his scandalous confessions to his psychiatrist. He is a sex addict who can't get laid. A traumatized child who grew into an underdeveloped man. He has countless fantasies, each more disturbed than the last. He is usually too afraid to act on them. He is obsessed with his mother, who used to threaten him with a bread knife, and resentful of his father, who was chronically constipated. He is a compulsive masturbator. Alexander Portnoy is a pleasure-seeking, overly altruistic, catastrophically libidinal, Freudian-wet-dream of a pervert.