ATTACHMENT AND SEXUAL DESIRE IN COUPLES: A FALSE DIVIDE

Erotic desire and the need for security, upon which attachment is based, are fundamental to the experience of love and the formation of long-term couple relationships. Sustained, gratifying sexual activity over time rests on the integration of these needs, whereby safety provides the partners the freedom for an erotic life and sex enlivens a sense of stability. Yet, many couple relationships suffer from problems that interfere with or arrest their sexual relations. The popular media and couple therapy literature are replete with cases of the loss of sexual desire in long term couple relationships. The narrative explanation most frequently offered is that the biology of sex and attachment are incompatible; good sex requires novelty; and familiarity over time equates to death in the bedroom. Thus, attachment based needs for security and erotic desire are positioned as reciprocally negating. From this viewpoint, a couple’s inevitable drift toward predictability in the service of security also signals the decline of excitement and erotic love. Love is confused with merger, and this must be countered by efforts to create novelty and opportunities for separateness. But when considering couple relationships, is it necessary to view attachment in direct competition with erotic love? In this paper, I propose that sustained sexual desire within a long-term couple relationship can be conceptualized as a complex experience that is best understood as an integration of attachment needs and erotic desire. I describe aspects of the theoretical legacy that have contributed to a split between attachment and sexual desire. I argue that the origins of attachment and sexuality are not easily or usefully separated into distinct categories in either infantile or adult experience.


Dr. Shelley Nathans is on the faculties of The Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group, The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and The San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. She is the director and producer of the film Robert Wallerstein: 65 Years at the Center of Psychoanalysis. She is on the international advisory board of the journal Couple and Family Psychoanalysis , is a founder of The Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group, and serves on its board of directors as Past President. Dr. Nathans has given numerous national and international presentations on couple psychotherapy theory and technique.

Her publications include Infidelity as Manic Defence (2015) , published in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis , “45 Years: an essay on the film by Andrew Haigh”, published in fort da (2018); “Whose Disgust is it Anyway?: Projection and Projective Identification in the Couple Relationship” in Psychoanalytic Dialogues ( 2016); and “Oedipus for Everyone: Revitalizing the Model for LBGTQ Couples and Single Parent Families”, in Psychoanalytic Dialogues (2021). She is co-editor, with Milton Schaefer, of Couples on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy and the Tavistock Model (Routledge, 2017) and the editor of the a second volume of collected papers about psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy entitled More About Couples on the Couch: Approaching Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy from an Expanded Perspective ( 2022). Dr. Nathans is in private practice in both San Francisco and Oakland, California.

When
May 14th, 2025 from  7:30 PM to  9:00 PM