Sexual intimacy and aging: An integrative framework to promote intimacy resilience in couple therapy.

In our work at the Intimacies Project at The Ackerman Institute for the Family we became aware of a gap in attention about sexuality and aging in the couple and family therapy field. In this article, we provide an integrative framework to guide therapists on how to address problems of sexuality and aging in the therapy room. Starting from considerations about the social context of aging and the self of the therapist, we contend that when normative sexual challenges become entangled with stigma, misconceptions about sexuality, limiting gender narratives, vulnerabilities, and defensive postures, they often result in emotional and sexual shutdowns.

What is queer about sex?: expanding sexual frames in theory and practice.

Psychotherapists often believe if couples improve their communication and emotional dynamics, good sex follows. In practice we often find otherwise and have many questions about how to proceed to work with sexuality issues more directly. This paper presents the many challenges working with sex including the following: the fluidity and multidimensionality of sex and gender, the incongruities and paradoxes in sexual behavior, thoughts, attractions, feelings, and sensations, and the powerful feelings, impasses, surprises, and confusion therapists often experience doing the work.

Lesbian psychoanalytic foremothers making waves.

ABSTRACT The progress lesbians have made within psychoanalysis is in its infancy since the first wave of gay/lesbian affirmative literature be-Suzanne Iasenza, PhD, is Associate Professor of Counseling at John Jay CollegeCity University of New York. She is on the faculties of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and the Institute for Human Identity. She maintains a private practice in psychotherapy and sex therapy in New York City.

Introduction.

ABSTRACT This volume presents a collection of psychoanalytically influenced authors writing about lesbian concerns. Profound changes have occurred within psychoanalysis due to the efforts of lesbian, gay, and bisexual scholars and the evolution of psychoanalytic theory away from classical models. The writers in this volume represent a second generation of scholars who have more latitude in using psychoanalysis to study sexual orientation and gender.

Beyond "lesbian bed death".

Abstract Myths about lesbian sexuality continue to exist but none have received such widespread discussion as "lesbian bed death", a myth that has become a clinical entity even though it lacks definitional clarity and empirical validity. Its users, often relying on gender socialization theory, overgeneralize and essentialize lesbian women's sexual experiences, obscuring the diversity of lesbian sexual experience. This paper critiques the use of the term "lesbian bed death" and provides examples from sex research and lesbian literature of the panoply of lesbian passions and play.