Arousal
The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Sexual fantasies. Everyone has them, but no one knows what they mean. People are curious about and often confused by the things that arouse them, yet they are often too ashamed to reveal their most private fantasies to their partners or even their therapists. In this fascinating and provocative book, Dr. Michael J. Bader offers a groundbreaking new theory of sexual desire, one that will liberate men and women and enable them to better understand their sexual preferences.
Drawing on his twenty-five years as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, Dr. Bader demonstrates that rather than being programmed by biology or society, sexual fantasies and preferences are really psychological antidotes to unconscious dangers. Armed with this novel theory, men and women will no longer need to feel ashamed about what arouses them or confused about what arouses others. Dr. Bader sensitively tells the stories of his patients and explains the meaning of their sexual fantasies. In terms refreshingly free of jargon, he reveals how his profound new theory can be used to decipher a wide variety of sexual fantasies and behavior, ranging from ordinary preferences about positions in bed to flamboyant scenarios worthy of the Marquis de Sade. And yet, Dr. Bader's exciting new theory transcends the realm of individual psychology. Readers will come away with a radically new understanding of such issues as sexual chemistry and boredom, cybersex, pornography, and the differences in how men and women get excited.
Both erudite and accessible, Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies is an important landmark in the literature of sexuality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This analysis of the pathologies of fantasy and psychology shows the road to hedonism is not paved with bricks but with dreams. With more than 20 years of counseling experience, Bader comes across as a compassionate psychotherapist, dedicated to exploring desire in whatever shape it might take: "Sexual excitement," he writes, "is loaded with taboos in our culture and is inevitably fraught with conflict and complications." Describing clinical practices and employing stories from his couch, Bader constructs a sexual world view wherein the shame and guilt patients experience in their early years (via the usual suspects: unhappy childhoods, bad parents) later well up in their intimate lives, often times in the form of secret and seemingly deviant fantasies. Throughout the book, Bader attempts to elucidate how these fantasies are used as the bridge between sexuality and the unreleased psychological tensions that float beneath the surface of consciousness. Readers may find his interpretations of fantasies from the familiar to the strange titillating (from voyeurism to coprophilia and sadomasochism), but may wonder if it's really accurate to say that "sexual fantasies are the keyhole through which we will be able to see our true selves." Bader's methodology insists that these desires are played out on a field viewed solely through the lens of psychoanalysis, a form of treatment some believe is outdated. And even though he may be a proponent of pop-sexology, Bader never gives a nod to Havelock Ellis, who pioneered in the field a century ago.