If we experience penetration, for example, as an act of possession or love or exploitation, that gives it a meaning, which is difficult to then ignore or negate.
Darian Leader takes the everyday claim that something was 'just sex' and shows why it cannot hold. Working from clinical material, case histories and cultural examples, he argues that a sexual act never arrives without meaning: it carries phantasy, anxiety, guilt, revenge, and the questions about bodies and difference that first form in childhood and persist unconsciously. What looks like a simple physical encounter is, for Leader, already shaped by a person's history and by what the act is made to stand for.
For the clinician, the value lies in how Leader reads sexual symptoms and impasses. He treats failure, repetition and apparent contradiction not as malfunctions to be corrected but as sites where unconscious positions become legible, and he stays close to the particulars of each case rather than to diagnostic categories. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, the book offers a way of listening to what a patient's sexuality is actually saying.
About the author
Darian Leader
Darian Leader is a British psychoanalyst and author working in the Lacanian tradition. Born in 1965, he was a founder member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR) in London and serves as president of the College of Psychoanalysts (UK). His books include Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, What Is Madness?, and Hands. He is also a trustee of the Freud Museum.
Details
- 2024
- Hamish Hamilton
- Hamish Hamilton
- 288
- 9780241624012