The Impossibility of Sex

Through several imagined characters, Susie Orbach, world-renowned author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue, opens the door of the therapy room to reveal the inner workings of the intimate relationship between patient and therapist. She invites us to discover not only what happens during the analytic hour but also, uniquely, how the therapist herself thinks and feels about her patient. In the therapy room we discover how we trust, how disappointment tears our psyche, how love and hate relate, what sexuality means to each of us, how betrayal closes us off to other people and how we dare to reopen ourselves. The therapist is a participant in these dramas. By scrutinizing the ways she is affected and stirred up by the patient she begins to understand what is occurring in the patient's inner world. Orbach's intriguing accounts of the therapeutic relationship are often deeply moving, occasionally shocking but always compulsive reading, exploding the myths that have built up around therapy.