Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy

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 non-monogamy, 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.

Author Biography

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.