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Sex, Attachment, and Couple Psychotherapy Psychoanalytic Perspectives
A collection of psychoanalytic essays exploring the complex interplay of sexuality, attachment, and unconscious dynamics within couple relationships, offering psychotherapists a framework to understand and treat sexual problems.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Why do so many couples who seem to have a good relationship stop having sex? This collection of essays, written by leading psychoanalytic couple psychotherapists from the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, delves into the intricate and often unconscious reasons behind sexual difficulties in adult partnerships. It bridges a historical gap in psychoanalytic literature by focusing specifically on the sexual dimension of couple therapy, exploring topics from loss of desire and sexual dread to perversion and the dynamics of power versus love. By integrating perspectives from Freudian drive theory, object relations, and attachment theory, the book provides clinicians with a rich, nuanced understanding of how early life experiences and unconscious fantasies shape adult sexuality, and offers profound insights into using the therapeutic relationship itself to unlock and resolve these deeply rooted issues.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A psychotherapist, counsellor, or analyst working with couples who wants to effectively help them resolve their sexual difficulties and achieve deeper intimacy.
- The problem
- Clients present with intractable sexual problems like loss of desire, impotence, or perverse dynamics, and traditional therapeutic approaches are not providing lasting solutions. The therapist feels confused, deskilled, anxious, or even a sense of dread when confronted with a couple's sexual issues, lacking a coherent psychoanalytic framework to understand and address this dimension of the relationship.
- The plan
- Re-examine the historical and theoretical context of sexuality within psychoanalysis.
- Learn to conceptualize sexual problems through the integrated lenses of attachment theory, object relations, and developmental psychology.
- Develop the skill of using your own countertransference as a diagnostic tool to understand the couple's unconscious dynamics and shared defenses.
- The payoff
- Feeling confident and competent in addressing sexual issues with couples. · Possessing a robust theoretical framework for understanding the link between attachment, unconscious fantasy, and sexual behavior. · Facilitating profound, lasting change in clients' sexual and emotional intimacy.
See our guide
Additional reading
- Love Relations: Normality and Pathology · Otto Kernberg
Cited for its object relations view on passionate love, linking sexual excitement to the integration of aggression and love, and the capacity to manage fears of merger and annihilation in intimate encounters.
- Attachment and Sexuality · Edited by D. Diamond, S. Blatt, & J. Lichtenberg
Frequently referenced as a foundational collection for the book's project of integrating attachment theory with psychoanalytic understandings of sexuality, exploring how early attachment patterns shape adult erotic life.
- Sexual Excitement: Dynamics of Erotic Life · Robert Stoller
Cited as a key work proposing that hostility, fantasy, and risk are central components of sexual excitement, providing a psychoanalytic framework for understanding the dynamics of both 'ordinary' and 'perverse' sexuality.
- Oedipus and the Couple · Edited by Francis Grier
Authored by one of the book's contributors, it is presented as a representative text of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships' approach, applying post-Kleinian ideas about the Oedipus complex and the 'third position' to adult partnerships.