RELATE (originally the National Marriage Guidance Council) is probably the largest and most successful service of its kind in the world. For over 50 years, helping many hundreds of thousands of couples and individuals, it has developed an approach to couple counselling that is based on acknowledgment of the uniqueness of individual clients and their relationships, a respect for their autonomy and cultural differences, and a commitment to counselling with empathy, genuineness and warmth. The authors of this book are excellently qualified to provide this unique account of the RELATE Approach in action: both were trained by RELATE, both have very substantial counselling experience, and both have supervised the work of other RELATE counsellors for several years. The ever-changing characteristics of relationships and family life are fully recognised in the RELATE Approach, which helps clients to find their solutions to difficulties of family life, transitions, separation, divorce, sexuality, gender and identity, by helping them to find meanings in the patterns of their relationships, and to make sense of emotions, thoughts and actions in themselves and their partner. This book is designed to enrich and stimulate the work of counsellors working within a wide range of counselling models and traditions. This is not a prescriptive manual but rather an informed guide to the RELATE Approach, which includes many illustrative examples and (invented) case studies. The RELATE Approach still depends upon the counsellor’s repertoire of counselling skills, but offers a three-stage counselling model (exploration, understanding, action) made operational within the format of brief, time-limited therapy. "The counsellors with RELATE and its predecessor, the Marriage Guidance movement, were the founders of counselling as we know it today. The approaches to counselling which they have developed have wide application. Butler and Joyce write very well and I found this book clear and full of good ideas for clinical practice. I can confidently recommend the book to all who care for couples in relationships." C. Murray Parkes OBE, MD, FRCPsych "A useful introduction to RELATE’s three-stage model of couple counselling and some of the concepts on which it is based." Christopher Clulow, Director of the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute

A comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date examination of the most important topics in human sexuality.

Psychological Perspectives on Human Sexuality offers a comprehensive and much-needed empirical examination of human sexuality. It is the first book in the field to speak to the needs of both the social scientist and the mental health professional. This important work also provides a complete scientific survey of the latest research along with guidance for its application to clinical practice.

Researchers, clinicians, and students alike will value this collection of critical reviews covering a broad range of contemporary scientific inquiry into human sexuality. The book encapsulates the state of the art in research in such new subjects as genital surgery on children and Internet sex, as well as the most current approaches to such traditional topics as sexual orientation and gender/transgender issues. You’ll also find in-depth coverage of such topics as:

• Male and Female Sexuality
• Sexual Fantasy and Erotica/Pornography
• Disabled Sexual Partners
• Older Adult Sexuality
• HIV/AIDS and Sexuality
• Paraphilias
• The Aftermath of Child Sexual Abuse
• Rape and Sexual Aggression
• Therapists’ Sexual Misconduct

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women-and their bodies-want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? In this elegant, searching book-spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism-Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women's desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood? In today's crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again'

This study argues that modern fiction, from Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism. Challenging overarching theories of the novel by mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Joseph Allen Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. A study of the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, this text is a survey of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.

Psychological approaches to sexual health have arisen independently in a variety of different contexts. Psychology of Sexual Health is the first book to draw together the knowledge base and expertise of clinicians and researchers from all disciplines in the psychological management of sexual health. The authors have presented advances in theory and practice in a practical way that will be accessible for all disciplines.

There have been rapid developments in the psychological management of sexually transmitted diseases, particularly HIV and AIDS. A significant proportion of those attending genitourinary clinics do not have a disease or infection, but rather are seeking help with sexual health issues relating to behaviour, prior sexual experiences and relationships. Sexual health problems are being increasingly raised by patients across many other health specialties. Hence an increasing number of practitioners are needing to understand the psychological issues underlying sexual health.

With contributions from experts around the world, this book addresses a wide range of issues including sexually transmitted diseases, sexual abuse, rape, abortion and genetic counselling.

Critics and defenders alike connect today's widespread anxieties about sexuality and culture to the political activism of the 1960s and the counterculture's preoccupation with the individual pursuit of pleasure/ In contrast, the essays in Swindling Single attribute the new sexual mores of that era not to its political upheavals but to a confluence of social, cultural, and economic factors that encouraged personal gratification and altered traditionally defined gender roles.

Contributors analyze a broad range of topics: the commercialization of avant-garde and exploitation films; new visions of female sexuality in That Girl and The Avengers; the social context of such cultural icons as Hugh Hefner and Charles Manson; the intersection of race and sexuality in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul oil Ice; and depictions of sexual pleasure in pornography and scientific films.

This book offers a collection of original contributions to the literature on sexual crime, religion and spirituality. Does religion help people desist from sexual crime? Can it form the basis of interventions to rehabilitate people? Or does it provide justification and opportunity for committing it? What do the perpetrators say about their faith? What about the victims and survivors of sexual crime? The book asks and answers these questions and more in a unique collection of chapters - from academics, chaplains and prisoners. The book begins with an exploration of the role, history and development of chaplaincy in the prison system over the years, before providing a more personal look through the eyes of the Lead Chaplain at Rampton High Secure hospital in the UK. Subsequent chapters weave together theories of desistance from sexual crime, and analyses of perpetrators' accounts of their offending are also offered, alongside firsthand accounts of prisoners from a range of religions. The book concludes with a thoughtful journey through the book by the Lead Chaplain at HMP Stafford, UK. It will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of psychology, criminology, theology and social work, as well as for practitioners, chaplains, and readers with an interest in learning about sexual crime, religion and spirituality.

This is the only book that systematically examines transgender sex work in the United States and globally. Bringing together perspectives from a rich range of disciplines and experiences, it is an invaluable resource on issues related to commercial sex in the transgender community and in the lives of trans sex workers, including mental health, substance use, relationship dynamics, encounters with the criminal justice system, and opportunities and challenges in the realm of public health. The volume covers trans sex workers' interactions with health, social service, and mental-health agencies, featuring more than forty contributors from across the globe. Synthesizing introductions by the editor help organize and put into context a vast and scattered research and empirical literature. The book is essential for researchers, health practitioners, and policy analysts in the areas of sex-work research, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTQ/gender studies.

Sex, for the entirety of human history, has never been about reproduction. Statistically speaking, only one out of every one thousand sexual acts between a man and a woman will result in a pregnancy. And, as we know, sex does not solely take place just between men and women. So: what is sex for? In this wide-ranging and powerful new history of sex, Dr Fern Riddell will uncover the sexual lives of our ancestors and show that, just like us, they were as preoccupied with sexual identities, masturbation, foreplay, sex and deviance; facing it with the same confusion, joy and accidental hilarity that we do today. By looking at how history has dealt with different parts of our sexual experience, we're taken on an illuminating and entertaining journey about why we have sex - and what that means today.

This collection is the first to be devoted entirely to medieval sexuality informed by current theories of sexuality and gender. It brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives to consider how the Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires.

Always considering sexuality in relation to gender, the gender, the body, and indentity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of that period. Topics include the medieval understanding of sodomy, the historical construction of heterosexuality, and the intersections of sexuality with race, gender, and religion.

This information-rich volume expands current knowledge about sexually violent predators and critiques SVP laws with the goal of fostering improvements in clinical practice and public policy. It offers a finely detailed evidence base on this problematic class of offenders, including the complex interactions of biophysiological and environmental factors that contribute to criminal sexual behavior. Chapters discuss a wide range of assessment issues and instruments central to SVP evaluation, and the possibilities for developing interventions that address individual motivations and behaviors to reduce the risk of reoffending. And throughout, careful attention is paid to ongoing legal, ethical, and logical concerns regarding sexually violent offenders, their treatment and confinement, and their post-confinement placement. Among the topics covered: * Civil commitment of sex offenders. * The physiological basis of problematic sexual interests and behaviors. * Sexually violent predator evaluations: problems and proposals. * Cultural considerations in the assessment of sexually violent predators. * Management of sex offenders in community settings. * Effective use of an expert in sexually violent predator commitment hearings. Offering numerous issues for discussion and debate with considerable implications for clinical practice, policy, and the judicial system, Sexually Violent Predators will interest and enlighten forensic psychologists and psychiatrists as well as social workers, policy-makers, and legal professionals.

How can we currently understand sexual dysfunction? How can psychodynamic theories contribute to an understanding of sexual difficulties? How can we treat sexual problems psychodynamically?;Counsellors and therapists can be hesitant about addressing the sexual problems of their clients from any perspective and sometimes lack the confidence to tackle the issues as they arise. This is the first book to describe comprehensively a specifically psychodynamic approach to sexual dysfunction. It reviews the range and nature of sexual difficulties, and evaluates the relevance of psychodynamic theory and interventions to the understanding, assessment and treatment of sexual problems with individuals and couples. It is illustrated throughout with helpful case study material. It shows how physical and cultural understandings of sexuality and sexual difficulty need to be an integrated part of work wih clients "Psychodynamic Approaches to Sexual Problems" is a useful book for all trainee and practising counsellors and therapists working within a psychodynamic or integrated framework.

The concept of sex addiction took hold in the 1980s as a product of cultural anxiety. Yet, despite being essentially mythical, sex addiction has to be taken seriously as a phenomenon. Its success as a purported malady lay with its medicalization, both as a self-help movement in terms of self-diagnosis, and as a rapidly growing industry of therapists treating the new disease. The media played a role in its history, first with TV, the tabloids and the case histories of claimed celebrity victims all helping to popularize the concept, and then with the impact of the Internet. This book is a critical history of an archetypically modern sexual syndrome. Reay, Attwood and Gooder argue that this strange history of social opportunism, diagnostic amorphism, therapeutic self-interest and popular cultural endorsement is marked by an essential social conservatism: sex addiction has become a convenient term to describe disapproved sex. It is a label without explanatory force. This book will be essential reading for those interested in sexuality studies, contemporary history, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, media studies and studies of the Internet. It will also be of interest to doctors and therapists currently working in this and related fields.

This book argues that structuralism makes itself useful when it engages with the non-Oedipal logics of femininity and psychosis. Building from the psychoanalytic belief that norms repress unconscious desire while structures open onto the creative resources of the symbolic, Sex for Structuralists looks to key texts in myth, trauma, and unconscious fantasy by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Levi-Strauss. It also examines innovative writings by contemporary Lacanian thinkers in order to discover what becomes of structuralism when the ground upon which it ostensibly stands (namely, that of the zero symbol or the incest prohibition) drops out from under it.