Working with Sexuality: Bodies, Desires and Imagination

Attending to Sexuality in the Psychoanalytic Relationship

Anton Hart discusses the importance of therapists being open to and curious about their own and their clients’ sexuality. As infants our sense of mind and sexuality develops in relation to caregivers and, as adults, our sexuality and our attitudes towards it reflect much about our individual human experience. Issues of privacy, shame and otherness contend with desires for connectedness, union and fulfillment in ways that are unavoidably and revealingly re-enacted in relational psychoanalyzis. Hart believes therapists should strive to empathically inhabit all aspects of their patients’ desires, fantasies and behavior so as to expand aspects of their own identities and thereby their analytical capabilities.