In search of Erotic Intelligence

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The transition to motherhood can have a desexualizing effect. I reminded them that the mother isn't an erotic image in our culture. Mom is supposed to be caring, nurturing, loving, but, frankly, rather asexual. "Being new parents can be pretty overwhelming," I said. "But can you try to add making love to the list of all the other things you enjoy doing together to unwind and relax? The idea is to make each other feel good, not to solve the fate of your relationship. That's an offer you can't refuse."

At the next session, Jenny reported: "That really loosened us up. We can talk about it, laugh and not be instantly scared."

So many couples imagine that they know everything there is to know about their mate. In large part, I see my job as trying to highlight how little they've seen, urging them to recover their curiosity and catch a glimpse behind the walls that encircle the other. As Mexican essayist Octavio Paz has written, eroticism is "the poetry of the body, the testimony of the senses. Like a poem, it is not linear, it meanders and twists back on itself, shows us what we do not see with our eyes, but in the eyes of our spirit. Eroticism reveals to us another world, inside this world. The senses become servants of the imagination, and let us see the invisible and hear the inaudible."

Esther Perel is on the faculties of the New York Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry, and the International Trauma Studies Program, New York University. She is in private practice in New York. From Psychotherapy Networker (May/June 2003). Subscriptions: $24/yr. (6 issues) from Box 5190 Brentwood, TN 37024.

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