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Lawrence Hedges, Routledge, 2011, 202 pp, £18.99
In his book, Sex in psychotherapy: Sexuality, passion, love and desire in the therapeutic encounter, Hedges is directly challenging accepted myths and preconceptions that distort our understanding of sex, gender and the erotic. He specifically focuses on psychoanalytic technique and the limited ways in which we, as analysts and therapists, think about sexuality in our consulting rooms, especially within ourselves in reaction to our patients. He argues, convincingly, that there is a need to actively engage our patients in the erotic transference/counter-transference.
To help the reader to rethink this whole area, Hedges utilizes discoveries over the past few decades from a comprehensive spectrum of fields of knowledge ‘that hold revolutionary implications for psychotherapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality’ (p. xv). It is as if Hedges is going back to late nineteenth century Vienna and taking a second look at libido and related psychoanalytic technique through the lens of what we now know and how we now think in the early twentieth century.
In the Introduction and Part 1 of the book Hedges lists and discusses the perspectives and discoveries that have changed the way we currently view sexuality. Some of those mentioned include: the historical and cross-cultural perspectives; brain and neurological research; early attachment and internalized erotic interaction patterns; dissociation and multiple selves perspective; trauma and transgenerational ghosts; and intersubjective and the relational third perspectives.
From this ‘revisit’, Hedges confirms and expands on Freud's discoveries of the complexities of sex and gender. Other implications he notes challenge or even contradict Freud's understanding of the role of the analyst's erotic responses to his or her patients and lead Hedges to propose the need to directly share and utilize these counter-transference experiences.
He then ties these findings together in what has culmin