This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious - have changed the ways we think about erotic life. In these papers Freud develops his now famous theories about the sexuality of childhood and the transgressive nature of human desire. In the famous case study of the eighteen-year-old 'Dora', we see Freud at work, both putting into practice and testing his sexual theories that were to change the modern world.

Freud's discovery of the preeminent role of sex in creating neuroses resulted in theories that changed the thinking of the world. He was a champion of greater sexual understanding in a society that only whispered the words he used out loud. This pioneering study of the nature of sexuality and love remains a monumental achievement. The importance of sexuality and infantilism in shaping individual destiny sets the general theme for these groundbreaking studies. Elaborating his now-famous frustration theory, Freud dramatically illustrates how a person's sexuality can be stifled to the point of neurosis by a sex-scared society. With utter frankness, he explains various aspects of homosexuality, incest, frigidity, impotence, masochism, sadism, and fetishism. Here is Freud at his most brilliant, raising the curtain on a new era of sexual and social awareness -- Publisher description.

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.

“[A] fascinating collection of essays” on the complicated relations between men and women from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of Loving (The New York Times Book Review). The renowned social psychologist delves deep into the fraught relationship between genders, drawing upon the influential insights of Bachofen, Freud, Marx, and Briffault. Not primarily interested in the existence of anatomical and biological differences between the sexes, Fromm instead analyzes how these differences have been made use of throughout human history. Drawing from Bachofen’s Mother Right, Fromm expounds on how matriarchal and patriarchal social structures determine relations between the sexes in essential ways, and how they are shaped by the dominant orientation of the social character at any given time. He posits that the most important question concerning gender relations is which characterological orientation determines human relationships: love or hate, love of life or fascination with force. Thus, it will not be gender conflict that will determine humanity’s future but whether we opt for love of life or love of death. “As these essays show, Fromm was a wide-ranging thinker whose writings sometimes manifested brilliant insights or practical wisdom.” —Kirkus Reviews

At the time of publication our understanding of sexuality relied heavily on biology, and also on morality, as was particularly evident when homosexuality and bisexuality were discussed. In this title, originally published in 1990, the author presents a compelling case for viewing the sexual dimension of life through an understanding of its symbols. The potent figure of the devil serves as his avenue of approach. In the first part of the book, the author presents a detailed case history of a young man who began psychoanalytic therapy with him because of a terrifying conviction that he could be possessed by the devil. In the course of therapy it emerged that the devil had entered into his consciousness as a vehicle to express a complex of homosexual wishes and fears that were deeply troubling to a man whose life history had been entirely heterosexual. The author argues that the assumptions about male psychology that came to pervade psychoanalytic theory after Freud’s death could not account for the nature of this young man’s conflicts or for the outcome of the analysis. In the second part of the book, the author cites historical and anthropological data to demonstrate that the depth and breadth of male psychology extend beyond the limits of what was considered normal by the neoconservative theorists who revised Freud’s theories to exclude his ideas about bisexuality. Rejecting the reduction of sexuality to biology, the author asserts that sexuality can be properly regarded as symbolic, in the same way that meaningful works of art and rituals are symbolic. The power of sexual images and actions comes from their ability to combine important meaning with intensely felt emotion. Finally, the author examines the way in which culture affects sexuality through its control of consciousness and its influence on what kinds of sexual symbols may be utilized and what kinds of meanings they may express.

This volume brings together in a single resource fourteen empirical studies examining a variety of emotions and behaviors covering many aspects of love, romance, and sexual interaction from recent issues of Current Psychology. Scholars from universities and research centers bring under the empiricist's microscope a variety of emotions and behaviors, ranging from dating relationships, criteria for the ideal mate held by both men and women, the relationship between perceptions of parents and partners in a direct test of psychoanalytic conceptualizations of mate selection, how the media influence perceptions about love and romance, sources of marital conflict, gender differences in responses to infidelity, and even the attitudes of "consumers" toward prostitution. Contributors and topics of discussion include: Albert Mehrabian and Jeffrey S. Blum, "Physical Appearance, Attractiveness, and the Mediating Effect of Emotions"; Gordon L. Flett, Paul L. Hewitt, Brenley Shapiro, and Jill Rayman, "Perfectionism, Beliefs, and Adjustment in Dating Relationships"; Robert Ervin Cramer, Jeffrey T. Schaefer, and Suzanne Reid, "Identifying the Ideal Mate: More Evidence for Male-Female Convergence"; Glenn Geher, "Perceived and Actual Characteristics of Parents and Partners: A Freudian Model of Mate Selection"; Claudia J. Haferkamp, "Beliefs about Relationships in Relation to Television Viewing, Soap Opera Viewing, and Self-Monitoring"; Blaine J. Flowers and Brooks Applegate, "Marital Satisfaction and Conventionalization Examined Didactically"; Claudia J. Haferkamp, "Dysfunctional Beliefs, Self-Monitoring, and Marital Conflict"; Emily A. Impett, Kristin P. Beals, and Letitia A. Peplau, "Testing the Investment Model of Relationship Commitment and Stability in a Longitudinal Study of Married Couples"; Richard Clements and Clifford H. Swensen, "Commitment to One's Spouse as a Predictor of Marital Quality among Older Couples"; Robert Ervin Cramer, William Todd Abraham, Lesley M. Johnson, Barbara Manning-Ryan, "Gender Differences in Subjective Distress to Emotional and Sexual Infidelity"; William Todd Abraham, Robert Ervin Cramer, Ana Maria Fernandez, and Eileen Mahler, "Infidelity, Race, and Gender"; Ami Rokach, "Strategies of Coping with Loneliness throughout the Lifespan."

Westerners believe that love makes life worth living; that sex is a natural desire different in kind from love; and that only cynics reduce our love life to a calculation of economic or genetic factors. In this volume, essays explore these and other assumptions about the relationship between romantic love and sex. This represents the first interdisciplinary social science study of love and sex. Contributors ask and answer questions such as: Is love just sex idealized, or is it a transcendent and divine emotion? Is love a cultural construct that is shared by members of the same culture, or is it a matter of personal taste? What keeps promiscuous people from using condoms even when they know they are at risk? Are black professional men so rare that their conceptions of love and sex differ from those of white professional men? Are brutal sexual fantasies an exclusively male domain, and are they always excluded from love fantasies among normal adolescents? Is divorce a culturally induced response to evolutionary reproductive strategies that compel individuals to maximize their genetic legacy? Are marriages or relationships less satisfying or stable when an actual mate falls short of the fantasy of the ideal mate? Is there a universal core to love and sex that is camouflaged by other cultural norms such as modesty and sexual segregation? Is rape perceived as more acceptable when the rapist says he was motivated by love? What do cult movements and romantic love have in common? As they attempt to answer these and other questions, the authors extend our understanding of the variety of ways that love and sex are conceptualized, connected, or separated.

Love and Attraction is a collection of papers presented at the International Conference on Love and Attraction. This book is organized into 12 parts encompassing 78 chapters that cover various aspects of the subjects, including friendship, intimacy, and sexuality. The introductory parts deal with the psychological aspects of physical attractiveness, non-verbal intimacy, attraction, and friendship. The subsequent parts examine the geographical difference in mate selection, marital relations, and romantic love. These chapters also look into the structural features of personality, behavior, and romantic love. These topics are followed by discussions of exchange theory applications to love and attraction; the social psychology of human sexuality; relationship between sexual behavior and society; and sex therapy. The final parts are devoted to other sex related topics, including sex therapy, erotica, arousal, child sexuality, and pedophilia. This book will prove useful to psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and other academic and clinical workers.

Rudolf Steiner presents the human soul dilemma, split into male and female attributes... but offers a path of development which will eventually lead to overcoming these - what Jung called 'individuation', a merging with the true self or true ego of the human being.' - from the IntroductionWe live in a sexualised society, surrounded by sexual imagery and content in almost every area of life. This presents us with many challenges, including an increasing blurring and confusion between love and sex; strife between men and women over their roles in society; and a consistent assault on the innocence of childhood. Despite the sensibilities of his time, Rudolf Steiner made a huge contribution to our understanding of the complex theme of sexuality. In this freshly-compiled anthology, Steiner describes the point in evolution at which human beings split from being androgynous and single-sexed to becoming male or female. He traces the changing roles of the sexes in society, from the matriarchal past to today's patriarchal dominance. The division of the sexes brings suffering, but also the possibility of achieving higher stages of love. In the distant future, humanity can evolve sexuality into a new form, with even the possibility of reproduction being metamorphosed. Refreshingly, Steiner is not judgmental and does not preach asceticism. He recognises the 'all-too-human' frailty people confront in their personal lives, even in the case of great individuals such as Goethe. Sex is a necessary stage of human evolution, and the split nature of the human being is a fact of our age. Its healing will be gradual but, like Amfortas in the Grail story - whose wounded groin was a metaphor for amorous misadventure - we can all be healed through love and compassion.