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A fascinating exploration of sexuality, pleasure and desire.
List of contents
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
We love men like we love our mothers
The first object of love
Loving like a child
The woman and the mother in us
Why do we regress when we love?
Maternal love is not sexual
CHAPTER TWO
The dynamic of sexual anatomy
The circulation of sexual energy
The role of the uterus in sexual pleasure
The clitoris, the hymen and the vagina
The uterus, the fallopian tubes and the ovaries
Hormonal control
The lesser pelvis, the hips and the perineum
Breasts and breastfeeding
Changes and transformations in a woman's body
Setting sexual energy in motion
CHAPTER THREE
The barrier of fire: recurrent disorders
Acute ailments, recurrent ailments
Looking for the origin
Fire in the genitals: blocked sexuality
Chinese medicine
Disrupting the repetition
Making love
Teaching our genitals about pleasure
The life force that inhabits us
CHAPTER FOUR
How little girls construct their sexuality and how daughters come undone when their mothers die
Expecting a little girl
At birth, the child becomes the magnetic catalyst
The power of names and surnames
Breast-feeding
Building the baby girl's sexuality
The dyad stage
Wanting to know the true story
Finding self-recognition
The father's role and the difference between sexes
Telling a little girl that later her genitals will welcome a man's
Parental intimacy
“But where was I before?”
The bottomless pit: falling into depression
Quest for meaning and renewal
CHAPTER FIVE
The gynaecological family tree
Painful menstruation
“Phantom” disorders
Premenstrual syndrome
Gynaecological ailments and their origins
Symptoms generated by family line disorders
Sterility and infertility
Unwanted pregnancies
The importance of knowing one's genealogy
The effects of building a genosociogram
Care
CHAPTER SIX
Desire
Inherited social and cultural burdens
First change: women think (1945)
Second change: birth control (1965)
Third change: sexual liberation?
“Third change: sexual liberation?
Parental fulfilment
Continued ignorance about sexuality
Desire: the energy that makes the encounter possible
When desire is inhibited
The body is not invaginated
How to break the cycle of transgenerational repetition
The starting point of a man's sexual desire is the genitals, while a woman's is in her heart, between her two breasts
Woman and their desire: floating heads
So, what is desire?
CHAPTER SEVEN
What is making love?
Courtship displays
Creating a shared space: foreplay and the encounter between the genitals
Fondling the breasts
Fixation on the clitoris
Desired, but also desiring
Benefitting from what we do not have
The co-penetration of the genitals
Creating the phallus
Feeling the uterus and maintaining the fire
Being fully present to oneself and to the other at the same time
Finding words again
Pathways of sexual energy
Completeness and surpassing oneself
Projecting oneself into the other's body
Jouissance: sexual joy
What is an orgasm?
Coming down after making love
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
INDEX
About the author
Daniele Flaumenbaum is a gynaecologist and acupuncurist, and a member of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris for over 40 years. In the 1980s Daniele studied Chinese medicine and Taoist sexual alchemy, as well as exploring transgenerational psychoanalysis which highlights ancestral heritage. She is a pioneer in her field in bringing these disciplines together and this has transformed her life as a woman and those of her patients. She has been the president of the 'Jardin d'Idees Association' since 2010.
