Words on my body, like a searching hand on a blank page

SEXUAL INTELLIGENCE

Words on my body, like a searching hand on a blank page

Thirty years after reading Erika Jong's Fear of Flying, ANNELIESE BURGESS reflects on our rich and complex erotic landscapes and checks what famed psychoanalyst Esther Perel says about them. And she wonders why we still struggle to speak about desire without shame.

THERE is the psychology of sex. The repertoire of sexual technique. The doing. And then there is the thinking. The deep, rich landscape of our desire, sensual imagination and erotic intelligence. The Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet Octavia Paz said erotica is the poetry of the body, just like poetry is the eroticism of language.

“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.

Superstar psychoanalyst Esther Perel says eroticism is sexuality that is transformed by our imagination. “Flirtation, longing and anticipation" play a big role, she says...

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