Desire
Why does desire become inhibited in so many long-term relationships? The conventional explanation is familiarity. But this would oddly single out sex...
Misrepresenting Bowlby
The language of 'attachment wounds' quietly pathologises what are, in fact, structural adaptations. Bowlby did not describe damaged children but resourceful...
Alcohol
Alcohol can become a libidinal investment — a source of pleasure not only in its immediate sensory aspects (the taste, the pleasant burning sensation,...
Porn
When clients come to therapy wanting to change a compulsive porn habit, it’s important to avoid the moralising or pseudo-medical labels such as 'sex...
Oceanic need
Our oceanic need for love, warmth, not to be hungry or afraid or bored, to be affirmed, can transmute into the desire of a single signifier: for example....
Babies
It's tempting to think a baby enters the world of language when it learns to speak: but in fact it is within language as soon it is spoken of. So it's...
Models of sex
There is model of sex which speaks of a 'mystical union of two bodies made one.’ But as Esther Perel correctly asserts, 'sex is not something you do,...
Symptoms
If the symptom is a form of ‘inarticulate’ self-expression, then psychotherapy is about enabling the patient realize what they are already ‘know’.
What is the ego?
What is the ego? For Anna Freud (and the ego-psychology movement) the ego is the mediator between the id (instincts, drives), the superego (internalised...
Does the body keep the score?
Does the body keep the score? The currently popular somatic theory of trauma — that the body stores undischarged energy and that therapy should release...
Sex 'addiction'
I welcome a statement on the term 'sex addiction' from the Sexual and Relationship Therapy journal. They argue that concept of "sex/porn addiction" should...
Attachment versus structural model
From an attachment perspective, the anxiously-attached partner is the product of their historical watchfulness - a behavior necessary to ensure the child's...
ED
What is erectile dysfunction? All symptoms have a double identity: they are an incoherent utterance in which something unsayable finds a bodily form,...
Anxiety
Anxiety is a way of signalling what cannot be put into words — often the fear of being subsumed by the Other’s desire, particularly when that Other is...
Cruelty
Cruelty is always possible — and always tempting — because it promises certainty, control, and relief from anxiety. Love is harder. It refuses certainty....
Happiness
Over the years, if we're lucky, first we lose our parents, and then we abandon our children in the world (any other order of events is a tragedy). In...
Avoidant attachment
In attachment theory, the usual contrast is between an anxious subject who wants closeness and an avoidant subject who fears it. From a more structural...
Trauma
Trauma comes to seem as if it is “stored” in the body when something has happened that could not be brought into words at the time. What then shows itself...