Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0710090722 ISBN 13: 9780710090720

Publisher: Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1983

David Scharff explores the role of sexuality in human relationships by combining his extensive experience in individual, marital, family, and sex therapy with theoretical contributions from development.

About the Author:

David E. Scharff, M. D., co-director of the International Institute of Object Relations Therapy, is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University, and a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. He has published extensively, is chair of I.I.O.R.T. Chevy Chase and Manhattan, and directs the two-year program in object relations theory and practice at I.I.O.R.T. Washington. Dr. Scharff is in the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy with adults, children, couples, and families in Chevy Chase.

Review:

Scharff shows how sexual union gives us the repeated opportunity to return to the source of our most profound instinctual needs so that we can find there the nourishment for emotional renewal through a harmonious interplay of our internal object relations. . . . Scharff sees patients with problems in sexually relating as needing help in finding out how to translate the problems into emotional equivalents that are susceptible to therapeutic change. . . . The family group offers the means of working through a second time in adulthood what went wrong the first time in childhood, by continued object seeking, finding, and repairing. It is the unique situation in which transferences can be creatively satisfied. (Andrew Powell)