Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : December 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 192
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98314
- ISBN 13 : 9781032327303
- ISBN 10 : 1032327308
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Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality bridges the gap between depth psychology and modern sex therapy, offering a fresh, integrative approach to understanding sexual struggles.
Rather than treating symptoms like low desire, intimacy challenges, or compulsive behaviors as dysfunctions to fix, this book reveals how they often carry emotional meaning linked to trauma, attachment, and unspoken conflict. Drawing on compelling clinical stories and contemporary theory, Juliane Maxwald helps clinicians decode the unconscious narratives behind sexual concerns. Chapters explore topics such as desire discrepancy, pornography, consensual nonmonogamy, erectile unpredictability, and narcissism, demonstrating how the thoughtful integration of technique and depth-oriented insight can foster real change. Grounded, accessible, and clinically rich, this book invites therapists to listen to sexuality not just as behavior, but as a window into emotional life - and as a story the psyche tells through the body.
This is essential reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and sex therapists seeking to deepen their work with issues related to sex, intimacy, and relational life.
Reviews and Endorsements
Sexuality, Desire, the Unconscious, the Unspoken! Finally, the connections are being made. This is a groundbreaking book that has been a long time coming. It warmed my heart and stimulated my mind.
Mark Epstein MD, author of Going to Pieces without Falling Apart and The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life
This book is a sterling addition to the growing movement within sex therapy toward integrative relational practice. Maxwald demonstrates a deep appreciation of both conscious and unconscious sources of desire, arousal and erotic connection. Her cases come alive as she deftly describes common challenges that lead, under her wise guidance, to pathways of transformation. Clearly written, she makes psychodynamic sex therapy not only accessible but compelling. A must read for psychoanalysts who want to better understand sexuality and sex therapists who want to understand the psychodynamics of sexuality.
Suzanne Iasenza, PhD, author, Transforming Sexual Narratives: A Relational Approach to Sex Therapy
Masters and Johnson may have taken the field of sex therapy from Freud to the laboratory, but Juliane Maxwald, with her modern psychoanalytic perspective, puts sex therapy back on the couch and shows us that everything old is new again. Her book Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality is a meaningful contribution to the literature and sure to deepen the toolset of any clinician working with sexuality.
Ian Kerner, sex therapist and NY Times best-selling author of She Comes First
Juliane Maxwald takes you deep into the mind of the psychoanalytically oriented sex therapist. Wonderfully written with a heavy reliance on case studies, Maxwald has made a substantial contribution to the next wave of sex therapy. This is a book that I will most certainly be recommending to both my sex therapy trainees and seasoned colleagues.
Daniel N. Watter, Ph.D., Past-President, The Society of Sex Therapy and Research (SSTAR), author The Existential Importance of the Penis: A Guide to Understanding Male Sexuality
Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality is a deeply honest and provocative dive into the undercurrents of sexuality. Juliane Maxwald leads readers into conversations that few have had but all of us need, particularly through a psychoanalytic framework. It is a first of its kind read on the shadow side of sexuality within a solidly clinical lens. Bravo Juliane!
Holly Richmond, PhD, author of Reclaiming Pleasure: A Sex Positive Guide for Moving Past Sexual Trauma and Living a Passionate Life
In her elegant and incisive debut, Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality, maverick therapist and psychoanalyst Juliane Maxwald does what many thought impossible: she explores sexuality and desire through a psychoanalytic lens while dispelling the tired notion that such work must be sex-negative, pathologizing, or dull. This brave book marks a bold new era for those of us integrating psychological wisdom and sexual intelligence into our healing practices. With a voice that blends clinical expertise, scholarship, compassion, and unapologetic power, Maxwald offers a much-needed—and deeply welcome—contribution to the field.
David M. Ortman, author of Sexual Outsiders: Understanding BDSM Sexualities and Communities
Juliane Maxwald’s new book, Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy, dives into a much-needed discussion about sexuality, intimacy, and meaning. Clinicians and members of the broader public will benefit tremendously from this warm and wise invitation to aliveness and connection.
Alexandra H. Solomon, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist, faculty at Northwestern University, bestselling author of Love Every Day, and host of the podcast, Reimagining Love
Table of Contents
Introduction — My Journey: From the Couch to the Consulting Room: How Psychoanalysis and Sex Therapy Came Together
1. From Silence to Discourse: Addressing Sexuality in the Counseling Room
2. Listening to What We Feel: Countertransference as Compass 3. The Erotic Mirror: Narcissism, Trauma, and the Sexual Self
4. Power at Play: BDSM, Relational Dynamics, and Therapeutic Healing
5. Sexual Healing: Masturbation, Trauma, and the Body’s Wisdom
6. Is Porn to Blame?: Rethinking Pornography in Sex Therapy
7. Binging on Sex: Transforming Compulsive Sexual Behavior
8. More Than the Agreement: Love, Loss, and Boundaries in Consensual Non-Monogamy
9. Between Knowing and Not Knowing: A Story of Sexual Fluidity
10. The Unconscious as Orgasm: Sex and the Journey into the Unknown
11. Desire Discrepancy: When Arousal and Attachment Collide
Conclusion - Where Do We Go From Here?: Toward a Relational Future in Sex Therapy
Addendum - Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar: The Case for Simple Solutions
About the Author(s)
Juliane Maxwald, MA, LP, CST, is a psychoanalyst and certified sex therapist in New York specializing in sexuality, trauma, and relational dynamics. She teaches and supervises nationally across psychoanalytic and sex therapy settings.
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