Polly Young-Eisendrath´s Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted was first published by Harmony Books in 1999. Since then, it has become a classic read for those readers– to use a cinematographic expression – who want to use analytical psychology to shed light on what women want. This book, when first published, was described (and still is) as “provocative and vital.” More than 20 years after its publication, this book still shows effectively “how to break out of this double bind so that” women “can encounter the challenges of choice and responsibility for our own desires.” The author “wisely uses mythological and personal stories to help us take control of our sexual, relational, material, and spiritual lives.” Therefore, “If you feel confused, resentful, or trapped in a life that does not seem to be fully yours, then you can find a clear path to your true self, once and for all, with the help of Women and Desire.” This book is the second of the series titled Jungianeum: Re-Covered Classics in Analytical Psychology curated by Stefano Carpani.

In this headline-making book, Daniel Bergner turns everything we thought we knew about women's desire on its head. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with renowned behavioural scientists, sexologists, psychologists and everyday women, Daniel Bergner asks: - Do women really crave intimacy and emotional connection? - Are women more disposed to sex with strangers or multiple partners than either science or society have ever let on? - And is 'the fairer sex' actually more sexually aggressive and anarchic than men?

Subtitle in pre-publication: Reclaim your body, consume what you crave, get the life & sex you deserve.

It’s a book that women talk to their girlfriends about, and a book they’d like their lovers to read. It’s an “intellectually sexy experience” that lyrically, wittily and provocatively explores women’s history of romantic obsession through the telling and deconstruction of a passionate love affair.

Working Out Desire examines spor meraki as an object of desire shared by a broad and diverse group of Istanbulite women. Sehlikoglu follows the latest anthropological scholarship that defines desire beyond the moment it is felt, experienced, or even yearned for, and as something that is formed through a series of social and historical makings. She traces Istanbulite women’s ever-increasing interest in exercise not merely to an interest in sport, but also to an interest in establishing a new self—one that attempts to escape from conventional feminine duties—and an investment in forming a more agentive, desiring, self. Working Out Desire develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor meraki to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively. Sehlikoglu pushes back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects. Instead, it places women’s desiring subjectivity at its center and traces women’s agentive aspirations in the way they bend the norms which are embedded in the multiple patriarchal ideologies (i.e. nationalism, religion, aesthetics) which operate on their selves. Working out Desire presents the ways in which women's changing habits, leisure, and self-formation in the Muslim world and the Middle East are connected to their agentive capacities to shift and transform their conditions and socio-cultural capabilities.

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.

Also available in an open-access, full-text edition at http: //oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/146844 Contradictory and provocative pathways crisscross the terrain of gender among contemporary psychologists and psychoanalysts. Clearing a path through this terrain, Polly Young-Eisendrath describes and illustrates issues of gender and desire among women and men. Young-Eisendrath introduces three world views: premodern, modern, and postmodern. Then, she calls our attention to how we shape reality and clearly explains how a lived postmodern philosophy is essential for us to understand ourselves and how we can change. Next, she discusses gender and sex differences in terms of how the former are flexible and the latter are not. The division of the human community into the two exclusive groups of male and female has important psychological implications on both conscious and unconscious levels. Most depth psychological theories of gender and sex have been androcentric, taking males as the norm for health, and have failed to develop a full understanding of desire, opposition, and idealization between the sexes. One major theme in a depth psychology of gender is that of Woman as the object of desire. The Greek myth of Pandora deftly illustrates the problem of female beauty: as the "desire-awakening maiden" Pandora is powerful but empty. The link between female beauty, power, and evil teaches us about the consequences of female appearance as a commodity to be used among men. Zeus placed the curse of Pandora on humankind, as a punishment for the theft of fire from the gods, and we are still living with the effects of this patriarchal curse. The double bind of female beauty (damned if you engage it and damned if you don't) must be lifted from the male-female relationships in this time of growing equality and reciprocity between the sexes. For women and men to reach their full potential of development as individuals and in relationships, they must break Pandora's curse and free themselves from the myth of the power of female beauty. In working to liberate us from the curse of Pandora, Young-Eisendrath has developed a theory of desire: desire contains within it a primordial absence, a sense that something is missing. When we come to understand the nature of desire itself we can be liberated from it domination. Drawing on experiences from culture, everyday life, and psychotherapy, Polly Young-Eisendrath's Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora provides a full engagement with the intricacies and complexities of gender, desire, and liberation for women and men in a postmodern world.