"Ella talks about her desire for men. She talks about her father, but I can't stop thinking about women and her mother. I feel like she's talking to me, explaining to me how she wants me to touch her. For Ella, sex is (is sex her?) a promise; a promise to be recognized by the other. It's a promise to fill the empty parts for a moment, to make up for all the losses, to find all the empty boxes – a promise that is fulfilled for a moment before it collapses back to the starting point, leaving her empty and distressed."

In this vignette, New York psychoanalyst Galit Atlas discusses the centrality of female desire in understanding the psychological experience of sexuality. Despite the centrality of sexuality in Freud's revolution, in contemporary psychoanalysis only a minority of psychoanalytic thinkers have directly addressed the expressions of sexuality in the therapeutic relationship. Galit Atlas offers us a groundbreaking and original theory for discussing sexuality in the therapy room with honesty and candor. She challenges accepted binary diagnoses between men and women, attachment and sexuality, pre-oedipal and oedipal, innocence and perversion, and more. Since her first book, "The Enigma of Desire," Atlas's writing has presented a referential framework for working with sexuality within the analytic couple. This perspective, following on from her article with Jessica Benjamin, focuses on sexuality and intersubjectivity and on unconscious patterns of arousal and regulation as they are co-created by the dyadic system. Her central thesis is that understanding the riddle of erotic desire passes through the dialectical tension between the pragmatic attachment to the object and its existential and enigmatic aspects.

In her upcoming book, Emotional Inheritance: Therapist, Patient, and the Legacy of Trauma, Atlas develops some of her ideas on sexuality and presents thoughts on trauma and erotic compensation, sexuality and war trauma, intergenerational transmission of sexual abuse, sexual and emotional intimacy, and the power of analytic love.

Prof. Aner Govrin and Dr. Sharon Ziv Beiman will talk with Galit Atlas about the main topics she explores in her book: sexuality in therapy, female desire, reciprocity, love and psychoanalysis, as well as Lou Aron's legacy, life with him, and the book she edited and which will be released soon with a collection of his articles.

Galit Atlas Ph.D. is a lecturer at New York University in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and in training programs at NIP. She is the author of The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015) and Dramatic Dialogue: contemporary Clinical Practice (co-authored with Lewis Aron, Routledge, 2017)

She is the editor and contributor of When Minds Meet: The Work of Lewis Aron (Routledge, 2020). Her next book, Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients and The Legacy of Trauma, will be published by Little Brown in 2021. Atlas is an editorial board member of the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives and has written articles and book chapters focusing primarily on gender and sexuality. Her New York Times article “A Tale of Two Twins” won the 2016 Gradiva Prize. Atlas is a psychoanalyst and instructor in private practice in New York City.