Christopher Clulow is a Senior Fellow of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, Founding Member and Vice Chair of the Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, Honorary Research Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and a Fellow of the Centre for Social Policy at Dartington. He is a Patron of Hertfordshire Central Relate and a Trustee for several charitable bodies working in the field of family support. He is the author or editor of nine other books and over a hundred published papers that consider marriage, partnerships, parenthood and couple psychotherapy, most recently from an attachment perspective. He was Therapies Editor of the international journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy between 1996 - 2008, and Chair of the International Commission for Family and Interpersonal Relationships between 1987-1994. He teaches in this country and overseas, and lives with his family in St Albans where he has a private couple psychotherapy practice.
'What, from a psychoanalytic point of view, constitute the 'facts of life'? What are the stories that our professional mentors tell us about the psychological equivalents of the 'birds and the bees'? How useful are these stories, and in what ways do they help those of us who work with couples understand and change the sexual difficulties that they present us with? Do these stories, indeed, have anything to say about sex, or might they, like the inventions of embarrassed parents, deflect our attention away from what we really need to know in relating to the sexual lives of our patients? Threading through the chapters of this book is a strong sense of the interconnection between sexual behaviour and patterns of attachment in couple relationships. Each provides a window on the other, and, like a double helix, they snake an intertwined pathway together over the life course. Different psychoanalytic conceptual narratives may give one spiral prominence over the other, and they may differ in the images they use in telling this central story of life, but there is an emerging relatedness and coherence between the perspectives that they offer.' - Christopher Clulow, from the Introduction The Contents Foreword - Peter Fonagy The Facts Of Life: An Introduction - Christopher Clulow Does Psychoanalysis Need Sexology? - Brett Kahr What Do We Mean By 'Sex'? - Warren Colman Lively And Deathly Intercourse - Francis Grier Separated Attachments And Sexual Aliveness - Susie Orbach Dynamics And Disorders Of Sexual Desire - Christopher Clulow & Maureen Boerma Sexual Dread And Therapist Desire - Susanna Abse Loss Of Desire And Therapist Dread - Sandy Rix & Avi Shmueli Loss Of Desire: A Psychosexual Case Study - Laura Green & Jane Seymour Power Versus Love In Sadomasochistic Couple Relationships - David Hewison From Fear Of Intimacy To Perversion - Mary Morgan & Judith Freedman Perversion As Protection - Joanna Rosenthall Intimacy And Sexuality In Later Life - Andrew Balfour