What Does It Mean to 'Make' Love?

Pommier reads the ordinary phrase 'making love' as a psychic act rather than a physical one, tracing how sexual life is organised by phantasy rather than anatomy. He argues that gender is not given by the body but chosen through repression: each person settles on one position by repressing another, and the repressed sex returns as both attraction and antagonism. This internal division, not biology, keeps desire in motion.

From that premise the book works through phantasy, desire, and perversion as the machinery of arousal, then turns at length to orgasm. Pommier treats orgasm as more than a physiological endpoint; the meanings a person attaches to it carry a political charge that ties private sexual experience to wider social arrangements.

Translated from the French, it appeared in Routledge's Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research series. For clinicians it offers a Lacanian frame for hearing how patients construct sexual difference and what they ask of climax.