The Impossibility Of Sex

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'.

In these intriguing accounts, The author, the celebrated author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, presents us with six imaginary clinical cases, including Adam, the serial seducer; Belle, the compulsive liar; and Joanne, the self-mutilator. Through them, the author presents an intriguing look into the hidden world of the consulting room. She demonstra

'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.

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.

Prominent participants in the development of queer theory explore the field in relation to their own intellectual itineraries, reflecting on its accomplishments, limitations, and critical potential.

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).

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.

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.

Through a probing investigation of conservative Christianity and its response to an issue that, according to the statistics of conservative Christian groups, affects only a small number of Americans, Ludger Viefhues-Bailey alights on a profound theological conundrum: in today's conservative Christian movement, both sexes are called upon to be at once assertive and submissive, masculine and feminine, not only within the home but also within the church, society, and the state. Therefore the arguments of conservative Christians against same-sex marriage involve more than literal readings of the Bible or nostalgia for simple gender roles. Focusing primarily on texts produced by Focus on the Family, a leading media and ministry organization informing conservative Christian culture, Viefhues-Bailey identifies two distinct ideas of male homosexuality: gender-disturbed and passive; and oversexed, strongly masculine, and aggressive. These homosexualities enable a complex ideal of Christian masculinity in which men are encouraged to be assertive toward the world while also being submissive toward God and family. This web of sexual contradiction influences the flow of power between the sexes and within the state. It joins notions of sexual equality to claims of "natural" difference, establishing a fraught basis for respectable romantic marriage. Heterosexual union is then treated as emblematic of, if not essential to, the success of American political life--yet far from creating gender stability, these tensions produce an endless striving for balance. Viefhues-Bailey's final, brilliant move is to connect the desire for stability to the conservative Christian movement's strategies of political power.