Main description:

With contributions from distinguished scholars and clinicians who view human erotic desire from modern developmental, relational, societal, and cross-cultural perspectives, Eroticism: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms offers a multifaceted and up-to-date glimpse into what we find sexually attractive and why. While psychoanalysis has unshackled itself from the narrow confines of instinct theory to include ego psychology, object relations theory, self psychology, and the contemporary relational paradigm, such heuristic and clinical advance is sorely needed to further our grasp of human eroticism and love. Accommodation also needs to be made for the cultural changes that have occurred over the last five or six decades. These include the feminist corrective to the phallocentrism of 'classical' psychoanalysis, the new insights into human subjectivity and personality development provided by the gay and lesbian movement, the contemporary de-centering of the essentialist and binary gender formulations, and the post-colonial voices of the non-Western people. By providing theoretically anchored clinical guidelines, Eroticism provides not only an update on the early analytic understanding of human eroticism but advances clinical praxis as well.

Contents:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

INTRODUCTION

PART I: Developmental Realm

Chapter One: Eroticism from an Evolutionary Perspective - J. Anderson Thomson & Kathryn Baselice

Chapter Two: Maternal Eroticism or the Necessary Risk of Madness - Rachel Boue Widawsky

Chapter Three: Locating the Father's Eroticism - Susan McNamara & Ethan Grumbach

Chapter Four: The Role of Innate Bisexuality in Adult Eroticism - Rajiv Gulati and David Pauley

PART II: Cultural Realm

Chapter Five: Cross-cultural Variations of Eroticism - Pranav Shah

Chapter Six: Fantasy, Sadism, and the Fetish in Pornography - Jason A. Wheeler Vega

Chapter Seven: Swipe, Woof, Flirt, and the Erotics of the Hand-held Device - R. Dennis Shelby

PART III: Clinical Realm

Chapter Eight: Adult Sexuality in Clinical Discourse - Louis Rothschild

Chapter Nine: Voyeurism - Salman Akhtar

Chapter Ten: Clinical Lessons Learnt from Eight Important Papers on Erotic and Erotized Transferences - Lorrie Chopra

Chapter Eleven: Erotic countertransference revelations - Andrea Celenza

References

Index