Transforming Sexual Narratives

Transforming Sexual Narratives offers readers the opportunity to address complex sexual problems through Narrative Relational Sex Therapy (NRST), an original approach that Suzanne Iasenza has developed during twenty-five years of clinical practice. This method presents a deeper, richer way of thinking about sexual challenges that has enabled clients to successfully rewrite their mistaken narratives to reclaim pleasure, intimacy, and satisfaction in their erotic lives. Drawing on the strengths of three very different therapeutic traditions - psychoanalytic, couple and family systems, and sex therapy - it delivers a fresh and dynamic way of understanding the complex interrelationship between personal, social, cultural, and familial sexual narratives. Chapters include conversations with diverse couples and individuals from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures, who exist in every kind of body, and in each case show how unconscious and harmful narratives can be transformed into healthy and pleasurable sex lives. This essential guide will help therapists to identify their client's secret sexual stories and enable them to rewrite their inner narratives and relationship with sexuality for the better. Sex therapists will be able to integrate a relational perspective into behavioral treatment, individual and couple therapists will be able to weave sexuality into general psychotherapy, and psychoanalysts will be able to use the sexual history to identify early dynamics that affect adult intimacy.

Suzanne Iasenza is a psychologist and sex therapist based in New York City. She is a faculty member at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and the Adelphi University Post-Graduate Program in Psychoanalysis.

Introduction Part 1: The Foundations of Narrative Relational Sex Therapy (NRST) 1. Sex is Possible without Desire 2. Expanding the Healthy Sex Narrative 3. The Sexual History: Identifying Conscious and Unconscious Narratives 4. Deconstructing Sex with the Sexual Menu 5. Moving from Mind to Body: A Narrative Approach to Mindful Touch Part 2: Applying NRST to Challenging Sexual Issues 6. Embracing The Complexity of Sexuality 7. When Three or More is Not a Crowd: Non-monogamy and Polyamory 8. We're All a Little Bit Kinky 9. George and Martha Try to Have Sex: Listening to Emotional Sadism 10. Sexual Resilience: Maintaining an Erotic Connection to Self and Other(s) References