Description
Book SynopsisA fascinating exploration of sexuality, pleasure and desire.
Dr. Flaumenbaum, a gynaecologist and acupuncturist, draws on more than forty years of experience to explain how women today build their sexuality, why pleasure or even desire is so seldom present, and importantly how to remedy it.
Her pioneering approach brings together gynaecology, Chinese medicine, psychoanalysis and transgenerational theory.Despite the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the prohibition of sexual pleasure and joy still exists, carried down from previous generations.
Dr. Flaumenbaum explores how this plays out, how sexuality is formed, the difference and complementarity between being a mother and a woman and how love and feelings are not enough to switch on the sexual connection.
Woman Desired, Woman Desiring provides case studies, covering a breadth of topics from gynaecological ailments to inherited social and cultural burdens.
Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
We love men like we love our mothers
The first object of love
Loving like a child
The woman and the mother in us
Why do we regress when we love?
Maternal love is not sexual
CHAPTER TWO
The dynamic of sexual anatomy
The circulation of sexual energy
The role of the uterus in sexual pleasure
The clitoris, the hymen and the vagina
The uterus, the fallopian tubes and the ovaries
Hormonal control
The lesser pelvis, the hips and the perineum
Breasts and breastfeeding
Changes and transformations in a woman's body
Setting sexual energy in motion
CHAPTER THREE
The barrier of fire: recurrent disorders
Acute ailments, recurrent ailments
Looking for the origin
Fire in the genitals: blocked sexuality
Chinese medicine
Disrupting the repetition
Making love
Teaching our genitals about pleasure
The life force that inhabits us
CHAPTER FOUR
How little girls construct their sexuality and how daughters come undone when their mothers die
Expecting a little girl
At birth, the child becomes the magnetic catalyst
The power of names and surnames
Breast-feeding
Building the baby girl's sexuality
The dyad stage
Wanting to know the true story
Finding self-recognition
The father's role and the difference between sexes
Telling a little girl that later her genitals will welcome a man's
Parental intimacy
“But where was I before?”
The bottomless pit: falling into depression
Quest for meaning and renewal
CHAPTER FIVE
The gynaecological family tree
Painful menstruation
“Phantom” disorders
Premenstrual syndrome
Gynaecological ailments and their origins
Symptoms generated by family line disorders
Sterility and infertility
Unwanted pregnancies
The importance of knowing one's genealogy
The effects of building a genosociogram
Care
CHAPTER SIX
Desire
Inherited social and cultural burdens
First change: women think (1945)
Second change: birth control (1965)
Third change: sexual liberation?
“Third change: sexual liberation?
Parental fulfilment
Continued ignorance about sexuality
Desire: the energy that makes the encounter possible
When desire is inhibited
The body is not invaginated
How to break the cycle of transgenerational repetition
The starting point of a man's sexual desire is the genitals, while a woman's is in her heart, between her two breasts
Woman and their desire: floating heads
So, what is desire?
CHAPTER SEVEN
What is making love?
Courtship displays
Creating a shared space: foreplay and the encounter between the genitals
Fondling the breasts
Fixation on the clitoris
Desired, but also desiring
Benefitting from what we do not have
The co-penetration of the genitals
Creating the phallus
Feeling the uterus and maintaining the fire
Being fully present to oneself and to the other at the same time
Finding words again
Pathways of sexual energy
Completeness and surpassing oneself
Projecting oneself into the other's body
Jouissance: sexual joy
What is an orgasm?
Coming down after making love
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
INDEX
