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Sensuality and Sexuality Across the Divide of Shame

• By Joseph D. Lichtenberg

• Price: $34.95 $31.46
• Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Pages: 160
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 31st August 2007
• ISBN: 978-0-88163-475-4

About the Book

Placed in a historical context, sexuality was once so prominent in psychoanalytic writing that sexual drive and psychoanalysis were synonymous. The exciting discovery of childhood sexuality filled the literature. Then other discoveries came to the fore until sexuality slipped far in the background. This book evokes the excitement of the original discoveries of childhood sexual experience while linking childhood sensuality and sexuality to adult attachment, romantic, and lustful love. This revised perspective offers the general reader insight into contemporary psychoanalytic thought, and presents clinicians with a perspective for exploring their patients sensuality and sexuality with renewed interest and knowledge.

Reviews

"Lichtenberg explores, with remarkably compelling clinical examples, the experiential disparity between sensuality (the integration of affection and sensual) and shame-dominated sexuality in dyadic and triadic experiences and romantic love, elaborating with sensitivity and clarity a wide-range of disturbances and disruptions of intimacy that Freud briefly considered in his abbreviated 1911 contribution. But he does much more in this contribution in his detailed and illuminating consideration of the development of sensuality and sexuality throughout the life cycle – from infancy, to the oedipal phase, to the different experiences of girls and boys in middle childhood and adolescence, to a consideration of different forms of attachment in adulthood. Lichtenberg has made a major contribution to the understanding of the complex yet subtle development of intimacy and the multiplicity of factors that can disrupt the development of this vital component of human existence." - Sidney J. Blatt, Ph.D., Co-Editor, Attachment and Sexuality (Analytic Press, 2007)

"Joe Lichtenberg has taken an essential and momentous step. He has clearly separated sensuality from sexuality and placed it as a distinct and independent motivational system. This is an advance too long avoided by the field. With this step, emotional development looks different and the role of shame is thrown into high relief. We are lead to a fresh view of several key concepts: the Oedipus Complex, attachment, gender and love. The implications for each of these are abundantl y discussed with clinical material. The axis of the field has been shifted." - Daniel Stern, M.D., Research Faculty, Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Columbia University

"If attachment theory is to be integrated into psychoanalytic thought it has to develop its own theory of sexuality. Lichtenberg’s excellent integration is a sophisticated, rich and imaginative leap forward in Lichtenberg’s inimitable scholarly yet clinically focused style. This book is a must for anyone interested in either attachment theory or sexuality." - Peter Fonagy, Ph.D., Freud Memorial Professor, University College London

"With this new book, Joe Lichtenberg achieves a most wonderful synthesis of theory, clinical acumen, experience-near observation of child and adolescent development, and personal experience. This is the achievement of such a mature thinker whose ideas and view are delivered in phenomenologically rich and compelling personal stories and cases. A central theme throughout the book is Lichtenberg’s deeply held conviction of the corrosive power of shame to shape a child’s or adult’s emerging experience of body and desire in sensual or sexual forms. His model of the development of the affiliative/attachment system and its relation to attachment is fleshed out (I use the term deliberately) with clinical, personal, and observational detail so we see the complexity of types of love and desire, the multiplicity of gender arrangements, and the subtle interplay of early attachment configurations, triangulated love, and family systems. This description of the book’s topics scarcely does justice to the book’s greatest strength: Lichtenberg’s wonderful, mature, playful, deep, wise, revelatory and respectful voice. This is a book to teach and to learn from." - Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., author, Gender as Soft Assembly (Analytic Press, 2005)

"Lichtenberg's book would be an invaluable resource to therapists who are working with individuals exhibiting adult attachment and/or romantic and exotic behaviors that are a result of childhood sexual experiences. It also conveys a progressive revisiting of the psychoanalytical outlook in response to how childhood sexual experiences impact adult sexual patterns." - Michelle Y. Smart in PsycCRITIQUES, Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, Volume 53, Issue 23

Table of Contents

1. Looking at Sensuality and Sexuality Across the Divide of Shame 2. The Oedipus Complex in the 21^st Century 3. Intimacy with the Gendered Self 4. Veronica: A Case Example 5. Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Daughters 6. Middle Childhood and Adolescence 7. Attachment Love, Romantic Love, Lustful Love, Lust without Love, Transference Love 8. Coda

About the Author(s)

Joseph D. Lichtenberg, M.D., is Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanaytic Inquiry, Director Emeritus of the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and past President of the International Council for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. He has authored and edited numerous books and articles, including Craft and Spirit: A Guide to the Exploratory Psychotherapies (Analytic Press, 2005) and, with Frank Lachmann and James Fosshage, A Sprit of Inquiry: Communication in Psychoanalysis (Analytic Press, 2002).

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