The Impossibility of Sex

The Impossibility of Sex
Author: Susie Orbach
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429921055

In this book I have struggled with certain words without a satisfactory conclusion. I am unhappy about all the words used to describe the person who visits the therapist's consulting room. Is she or he a patient? Well, sometimes yes. Certain individuals like that word because it captures for them the sense that there is something wrong, an emotional illness. Is she or he a client? Again, sometimes yes. Certain individuals like that word because it connotes a kind of consultative process. Is she or he an analysand? Certain individuals like this word because it conveys something about the process of a therapy and it has a symmetry: analyst–analysand. I myself find that all these words capture something about the therapy and the therapy process but are considerably less than perfect. In what follows I have chosen to use the words interchangeably, as well as the words psychotherapist, therapist and analyst. In the text, in the musings in italics, I have usually referred to the primary carer in the person's early life as mother. I realize that this is not always the case. There are fathers who have primary responsibility for their children from birth and there are relatives and nannies who fulfil this role. Rarely in my clinical experience of seeing adults has this role been an enterprise between two people in the way that it is becoming for some couples with children today. We have yet to see the effects of joint child-rearing on adult psychologies so I have retained the notion of the mother or mother substitute, a notion which will have to be expanded as the generations now raising children make new arrangements between them. I have also chosen for simplicity's sake to use the word 'she' throughout for the personal pronoun rather than 'she or he'.

The Impossibility of Us

The Impossibility of Us
Author: Katy Upperman
Publisher: Swoon Reads
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2018-07-31
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1250127998

Told in two voices Mati, a devout Muslim from Afghanistan, and Elise, a seventeen-year-old whose brother was killed there, try to keep their budding romance secret from their families.

Susie Orbach on Eating

Susie Orbach on Eating
Author: Susie Orbach
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 66
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0141927909

'Eating is pleasurable, eating is delicious, eating is sensual' says Susie. But for so many of us eating is associated with anguish and abstinence. From the first page this little book shows us how to think and feel differently about what we eat. So that we eat when we are hungry, eat what we want to eat to satisfy us and stop when we are full. Each page contains an easily absorbed bite-sized statement to transform eating that hurts into eating that nourishes and calms. This book isn't magic but it feels as if it is.

What IS Sex?

What IS Sex?
Author: Alenka Zupancic
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262534134

Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, “What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan “orthopedists of the unconscious.” Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

In Therapy

In Therapy
Author: Susie Orbach
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2017-12-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1782834311

Worldwide, an increasingly diverse and growing number of people are seeking therapy. We go to address past traumas, to break patterns of behaviour, to confront eating disorders or addiction, to talk about relationships, or simply because we want to find out more about ourselves. Susie Orbach has been a psychotherapist for over forty years. Also a million-copy bestselling author, The New York Times called her the 'most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud'. Here, she explores what goes on in the process of therapy through a series of dramatized case studies. Insightful and honest about a process often necessarily shrouded in secrecy, In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an essential read for those curious about, or considering entering, therapy. This complete edition takes us deeper into the world of therapy, with 13 further sessions and a new introduction.

Bodies

Bodies
Author: Susie Orbach
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-03-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1429918942

Esteemed Psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach diagnoses the crisis in our relationship to our bodies and points the way toward a process of healing. Throughout the Western world, people have come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some change in their bodies. Here Susie Orbach explains the origins of this condition, and examines its implications for all of us. Challenging the Freudian view that bodily disorders originate and progress in the mind, Orbach argues that we should look at self-mutilation, obesity, anorexia, and plastic surgery on their own terms, through a reading of the body itself. Incorporating the latest research from neuropsychology, as well as case studies from her own practice, she traces many of these fixations back to the relationship between mothers and babies, to anxieties that are transferred unconsciously, at a very deep level, between the two. Orbach reveals how vulnerable our bodies are, how susceptible to every kind of negative stimulus--from a nursing infant sensing a mother's discomfort to a grown man or woman feeling inadequate because of a model on a billboard. That vulnerability makes the stakes right now tremendously high. In the past several decades, a globalized media has overwhelmed us with images of an idealized, westernized body, and conditioned us to see any exception to that ideal as a problem. The body has become an object, a site of production and commerce in and of itself. Instead of our bodies making things, we now make our bodies. Susie Orbach reveals the true dimensions of the crisis, and points the way toward healing and acceptance.

What's Really Going on Here?

What's Really Going on Here?
Author: Susie Orbach
Publisher: Virago Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 1994
Genre: Emotions
ISBN: 9781853817984

Here are fascinating articles on sex, jealousy, anger, intimacy, loss, food problems, parent/child relationships, sibling rivalry and much more...from Susie Orbach, truly innovative therapist and a highly accessible writer. Together they result in a coherent and profoundly perceptive exploration of our emotional lives. 'We have no shared language for emotional life...What continues to engage me is the desire to increase our understanding of the intersection of the very private, intimate world and the structures of the wider public sphere' - Susie Orbach

Hunger Strike

Hunger Strike
Author: Susie Orbach
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429914660

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist arid writer. With Luise Eichenbaum she co-founded The Women's Therapy Centre in London in 1976 and in 1981 The Women's Therapy Centre Institute in New York. She lectures extensively in Europe and North America, is a visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and has a practice seeing individuals and couples and consulting to organizations. She is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, as well as to radio and television programmes. Her other books on eating problems are Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978), Fat is a Feminist Issue II (1982) and On Eating (2002). With Luise Eichenbaum she has written Understanding Women: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Account (1982), What do Women Want (1983) and Between Women (1988). She is also the author of What's Really Going on Here (1993), Towards Emotional Literacy (1999) and The Impossibility of Sex (1999).

Polysexuality

Polysexuality
Author: Francois Peraldi
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1981
Genre: Psychology
ISBN:

Mixing documents, interviews, fiction, theory, poetry, psychiatry and anthropology, "Polysexuality" became the encyclopedia sexualis of a continent that is still emerging. Originally conceived as a special Semiotext(e) issue on homosexuality at the end of the 70s, “Polysexuality" quickly evolved into a more complex and iconoclastic project whose intent was to do away with recognized genders altogether, considered far too limitative. The project landed somewhere between humor, anarchy, science-fiction, utopia and apocalypse. In the few years that it took to put it together, it also evolved from a joyous schizo concept to a darker, neo-Lacanian elaboration on the impossibility of sexuality. The tension between the two, occasionally perceptible, is the theoretical subtext of the issue. Upping the ante on gender distinctions, "Polysexuality" started by blowing wide open all sexual classifications, inventing unheard-of categories, regrouping singular features into often original configurations, like Corporate Sex, Alimentary Sex, Soft or Violent Sex, Discursive Sex, Self- Sex, Animal Sex, Child Sex, Morbid Sex, or Sex of the Gaze. Mixing documents, interviews, fiction, theory, poetry, psychiatry and anthropology, "Polysexuality" became the encyclopedia sexualis of a continent that is still emerging. What it displayed in all its forms could be called, broadly speaking, the Sexuality of Capital. (Actually the issue being rather hot, it was decided to cool it off somewhat by only using “capitals” throughout the issue. It was also the first issue for which we used the computer). The "Polysexuality" issue was attacked in Congress for its alleged advocation of animal sex. Includes work by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Félix Guattari, Paul Verlaine, William S. Burroughs, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Paul Virilio, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and more.

Sex and the Failed Absolute

Sex and the Failed Absolute
Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2019-09-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350043788

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.