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.

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.

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.