Indeed, I was a cultural outsider in my own family. As the daughter of Polish refugees resettled in Antwerp, I had a family sexual culture entirely at odds with (and deeply suspicious of) the modern, sexually emancipated Franco-Belgian culture in which we lived. My mother relied heavily on indisputable statements: “The world has not changed. Men marry who they want; women who they can. Men will play with you, but they will marry a girl with a respectable reputation. Sex before marriage is not respectable.”

Like so many self- suppressed people, my mother lived out her fantasies as an avid reader of ” Nous -Deux” a popular romance magazine of the day. She read them between customers behind the counter in our family’s store. I read them while she was serving the customers. I was immersed in these stories of seduction and betrayal, of seemingly submissive women but oh so powerful, driving men mad with desire. In my own night fantasies I was kidnapped many times by a man who could not live without me. After much resistance I would finally give in. It was always my choice, of course; I knew how weak he was in the face of my seductive powers. Many French teen magazines — perhaps like American teen magazines — would help me in the process of my erotic self knowledge, and feed my growing eagerness to be like the Belgian girls and to defy the shtetl truths. This was the ’70s; we were unafraid of pregnancy (thanks to the pill) and not yet fearful of AIDS and so felt totally free to explore. We saw the female body in sections: down to her neck, to her breast, then the belly, at last the genitals and below; these demarcations connoted our level of commitment and self-imposed limits. Though we separated pleasure from morality, love stories were far more popular than raw sex stories, for the boys and girls alike.

As girls, our sexiness always accompanied us– to school, to bureaucratic offices and in situations where flirting with policemen could avoid a ticket. We felt proud of our sexual power. Heading to Israel for college, I discovered this most unusual mix of religious Jewish values and an intensely sexual environment: Sex, I learned, is the best antidote for war. In Jerusalem, particularly, I felt the amazing melding of the erotic and the sacred, as in that most erotic of religious poem “The Song of Songs” .The sensuality of the various houses of worship, the golden glow on the stones at dawn and at dusk was an enchantment to the senses. I also discovered the eroticism of Islam — think of the seductive powers of Scheherazade — a dimension of that culture now so obscured. Arriving in the United States to complete my masters and internship, I worked at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (and soon discovered that although I was part of the Hispanic Unit, my French accent eased the way to a reverse prejudice: French is smart, classy). I never used up my return ticket. I married and had two babies. Having a child in a foreign country is an illuminating window into sexual mores. As Adam Gopnick writes in his book “Paris to the Moon” (describing his wife’s pregnancies and birth experiences in the two countries):” All American What- to- Expect Books begin with the Test, not the Act.” In Paris, pregnancy is something that has happened because of sex, which with help and counsel can end with your being set free to go out and have more sex. In New York, pregnancy is a ward in the house of Medicine. In Paris, it is a chapter in a sentimental education, a strange consequence of the pleasures of the body.

Living in America for the past 20 years , other differences between European and American attitudes towards sex have become apparent. Few countries, for example, have been so rocked by the sexual escapades of their leaders. In neither Belgium nor Israel did the sexual life of our politicians interest us much. We hoped they had one and enjoyed it. President Mitterand’s licentiousness (openly escorting his mistress) made him more human and more popular. Even errors and bad judgments made leaders more trustworthy. They shared our weaknesses and therefore could better serve us.

The elevation of mind over body has also been particularly strong in this rationalist and pragmatic society. The indirect and ambiguous communications of the body are often mistrusted as opposed to the power of direct speech, of getting straight to the point. This is the land of the “work ethic;” Reason over passion, work over pleasure, doing over being are but a few additional imperatives of the historical America Puritan ethos.

The presenter introduced us to a relational model of couple’s therapy, which argues that we achieve a sense of personal integration through connection with others. It contrasts with the view that personal development is achieved through mastery, individual autonomy and self-sufficiency. The conversation that followed centered on the questions of what pathology might underlie the man’s need for objectification and might have led the woman to desire bondage in the first place. Perhaps, participants speculated, motherhood had restored her sense of dignity so that now she refused to be demeaned. Some highlighted the gender differences between men’s pursuit of separateness, power and control versus women’s pursuit of affiliation and connection. Others emphasized the need for empathic connection to counteract abusive, power-driven relationships. After two hours of talking about sex, the group had still not once mentioned the words pleasure or eroticism, so I finally spoke up. Was I alone in my surprise at this omission?

Their form of sex, after all, had been entirely consensual. Maybe the woman no longer wanted to be tied up because she now had a baby constantly attached to her breasts, binding her more effectively than ropes ever could. Did people in the audience not each have preferences, preferences they did not feel the need to interpret or justify? Or was a woman’s ready participation in S&M too great a challenge for the politically correct? Did they object to the fact that aggression is a central feature of passionate love and that it is always a close companion of dependency? In the words of Robert Stoller: “Aggression is love’s shadow.”

Though I had been counseling couples on sex for years, that experience inspired me to reflect on how I had come to have views that seemed to be out of step with so many therapists working in the United States. It also led me to reflect on my personal and cultural history, and to many long conversations with other European friends and therapists, and also with Brazilian and Israeli colleagues. They reassured me that while I may seem out-of-step here, my views on the importance of pleasure and emotional expressiveness, as well as my cautions against the drawbacks of rationality, directness, and policing sexuality are widely shared elsewhere.

I was inspired to read the books that now seem to influence most powerfully the American therapeutic community’s view of sexual dysfunction and healing (Helen Singer Kaplan, Pat Love, David Schnarch). I also turned in a deeper way to European and American works on love and sexuality, desire and seduction, gay and lesbian sexualities, re-reading Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Jessica Benjamin. It led me to consider how our understanding of “sex” has left out eroticism and how modern notions of couples equality and intimacy have collided with the politics of erotic desire. It made me reexamine our assumptions that see fantasy in romance as temporary, fading and clouding reality rather than regarding it, enhancing and animating a fuller reality. It confirmed that “Reality testing” no longer held the epistemological superiority in the experience of love and romance. I was particularly interested in the duality between our need for safety and stability in relationships and our desire for transcendence. How we seek a reliable anchoring in our partner but also want to step beyond the borders and limitations of our life and of our body. In other words how we can reconcile in long term relationships the conflicting need for a sense of grounding that is known and predictable and our wish to escape the familiar in pursuit of the “unpredictable, the uncanny and the awe inspiring” (Mitchell). More importantly, what do we do as therapists when the couples we see present us with this paradox, or better even when they are divided, each partner experiencing one side of the conflict?

While the therapeutic culture is often imagined to function as a corrective to the dominant culture, it often seems to me to mirror that culture all too thoroughly. My status as an outsider has given me a somewhat different perspective. I am acutely aware that some of the very cultural features that drew me to this country, I also see as the main features that burden many relationships. For example, a central idea in couple’s therapy today stems from the search for egalitarianism, which has its corollary in an ethos of sexual egalitarianism. Egalitarianism, of course, is one of the greatest advancements in modern society, but it has exacted a toll in the erotic realm. It invokes such civic rights as respect, care, compromise and other morally laudable principles, whereas sexual excitement is all but politically correct. It is known to thrive on power plays, role reversals, and undemocratic acts. Daphne Merkin eloquently echoes Robert J. Stoller, “no bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.” Or as Luis Bunuel put it more bluntly: sex without sin is like an egg without salt. American couples therapists, shaped by the legacy of egalitarian ideals, often find themselves challenged by these contradictions.

Puritanism and rationality too are echoed in this therapeutic culture, and in a general undervaluing of eroticism. The lust for adventure and the crossing of boundaries, are often interpreted as fears of commitment and infantile fantasies. In the conflict between the drabness of the familiar and the excitement of the unknown our therapeutic culture has often seen the solution in the renouncing of these fantasies. Rationality must prevail. Fantasies are seen as clouding reality, the idealization of romance as immature love, and we tend to encourage our patients to ”really know” their partner. Marcel Proust the wonderful writer of the subtleties of romance, warns us that sometimes it is better not to be too familiar with our partner, for certain kinds of knowledge can reduce our interest in them and are in fact counter-erotic. Eroticism, which calls for the celebration of ritual and imagination, the infinite fascination with the hidden, the mysterious and the suggestive for no other reason than pleasure does not have a place in this objectivist view of life.

Sex therapies have had a rationalist or scientific bent: consider Masters and Johnson’s studies and the tenets of behavioral sex therapy of Helen Singer Kaplan. The talk therapy so dominant in this culture has privileged the word and so underutilized the body as text and vehicle for self-solace and self-revelation and connection with another.

What I propose here is an approach to couples’ therapy that inverts the usual priorities. Instead of looking first at a couple’s interpersonal dynamics and family history, this approach begins by exploring a couple’s sexual behavior and sensual relation. My approach is to challenge the dominant notions that have favored the language of the mind over the language of the body. Each partner’s body, imprinted as it is with all the individual’s history and the culture’s admonitions, becomes a text to be read by all of us together. In the same way, we explore the partners’ sexual relationships, both within the couple and with others outside. Together, these excavations of physicality and sex provide in my experience a revealing window into individual psycho-dynamics, the dyadic relation and family of origin issues. The body is also granted, in this approach, its profound capacities, for soothing and for communicating: it can often speak when words fail. Sex becomes a way both to illuminate what’s wrong– the conflicts and confusions around intimacy and desire–and to begin to heal those destructive splits. Giddens sums it up when he says that sex is the connecting point between the body, social identity and social norms. During my years working as a cross-cultural therapist, I have often taken this alternate path to help my patients achieve richer erotic lives, recreating in effect some of my foreign culture within the therapeutic setting.

Mating in Captivity sets out to explore the uncanny paradox of intimacy and sexual desire: that good intimacy doesn’t necessarily make for good sex. I believe that separateness is a precondition for connection; if love is about having, desire is about wanting. It is stoked by mystery, distance, and the realization that we never own our partner. They are forever elusive, even while we claim to know them inside out.

Mating in Captivity examines the difference between sexuality and eroticism, and shows that erotic intelligence stretches far beyond sex education and the blatant sexuality we are constantly exposed to in our consumer culture. It is an intelligence that celebrates ritual and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden, illicit, and suggestive. The book aspires to engage the reader in an honest, enlightened, and provocative exploration of the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas. It encourages you to question yourself, to speak the unspoken, and to be unafraid to challenge sexual and emotional correctness. It grapples with the tensions, obstacles, and anxieties that arise when our quest for love and security conflicts with our pursuit of adventure and enchantment.

The sexlessness of the American couple has made the front cover of most respectable magazines in the last several years, from Newsweek to Time to Atlantic Monthly. Even The Wall Street Journal has weighed in on the issue. Couples flock to the self-help aisle, looking to rekindle what they once had. And while the How-to books do go some way toward resuscitating flagging libidos, they don’t address the complexities of desire or its concomitant dilemmas: why is it that good intimacy doesn’t always lead to good sex? Why does the transition to parenthood so often deliver a fatal erotic blow to the couple? Can we sustain desire once the object is within reach, or must desire always be fueled by absence and longing? How can we go about cultivating mystery within the familiar? In Mating in Captivity I explain that our fundamental need for safety (often what propels us toward committed relationships in the first place) is countered by the equally strong need for adventure. Reconciling these two competing needs is at the heart of sustaining desire over time. It is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve.