What Does It Mean To 'make' Love? (a Psychoanalytic Study Of Sexuality And Phantasy)

What Does It Mean to Make Love? shows how the choice of gender does not conform to anatomy and is based on an often-unrecognised psychic bisexuality.

What Does It Mean to ''Make'' Love? shows how the choice of gender does not conform to anatomy and is based on an often unrecognised psychic bisexuality.

Everyone chooses a gender by repressing another gender, which becomes the site of both an attraction and a conflict, a ''war of the sexes'', the contingencies of which animate desire. Gérard Pommier explores phantasy, desire and perversion and their role in ''sexual machinery'', before considering the question of orgasm. Pommier’s work demonstrates that the analysis of orgasm brings out a political dimension and that aspects of both social and personal life are illuminated by the study of how we think – consciously and unconsciously – about orgasm and the role we ascribe to it.

This book makes valuable contributions to the study of sexuality and will be of interest to all psychoanalysts and students of psychoanalysis, as well as those in the fields of gender studies, anthropology and psychology.

Introduction

Chapter 1

On the metamorphic principle of bodies

Chapter 2

From autoerotism to autoerotism for two, on the way to… erotism

Chapter 3

Invariants and variables of human sexuality

Chapter 4

The dangers of ‘becoming feminine’

Chapter 5

Fundamental fantasies, organisers of sexual desire

Chapter 6

Where does the power of desire come from?

Chapter 7

From perversion to neurotic perversity

Chapter 8

Orgasm, perhaps

Chapter 9

What the study of the orgasm brings to psychoanalytic theory

Chapter 10

What never ends

Chapter 11

In search of the Sovereign Good

Gérard Pommier (1941–2023) was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He was Professor of Psychopathology at the University of Strasbourg, director of the journal La clinique lacanienne and co-founder of the European Foundation for Psychoanalysis.