Intimacy

Fülszöveg

Sntimacy,
Senóitivity,} Sex and tke cArt o/ J^ove
Gina Allén and Clement G. Martin, M.D.
The sexual revolution has brought us to the age of the sexual jock. We are engaged, we're told, in a game in which everyone is expected to be a competitor. The goals, rules, and scor-ing are controlled by the "experts," who alsó instruct in technique. For many people sex has become the new gymnastics, the new technology, the new marriage oL sport and science, the new exhibitionism. Yet in all this there is something schizophrenic, the au-thors argue. Sex cannot be celebrated as a thing apart; rather, it is an integrál part of our lives.
Sex is the adult's spontaneous play in which one gives oneself to another in abandoned vulnerability and ac-cepts the other's unquestioning trust. Though these activities facilitate the physical act of sex they are not them-selves physical. They are deeply emo-tional. The emotional need for physical closeness that alsó cherishes and nurtures—for, in a word,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Sntimacy,
Senóitivity,} Sex and tke cArt o/ J^ove
Gina Allén and Clement G. Martin, M.D.
The sexual revolution has brought us to the age of the sexual jock. We are engaged, we're told, in a game in which everyone is expected to be a competitor. The goals, rules, and scor-ing are controlled by the "experts," who alsó instruct in technique. For many people sex has become the new gymnastics, the new technology, the new marriage oL sport and science, the new exhibitionism. Yet in all this there is something schizophrenic, the au-thors argue. Sex cannot be celebrated as a thing apart; rather, it is an integrál part of our lives.
Sex is the adult's spontaneous play in which one gives oneself to another in abandoned vulnerability and ac-cepts the other's unquestioning trust. Though these activities facilitate the physical act of sex they are not them-selves physical. They are deeply emo-tional. The emotional need for physical closeness that alsó cherishes and nurtures—for, in a word, intimacy—is as basic and real as the need for sex.
Intimacy is a guide to meaningful intimate contact, the missing link be-tween love and sex. Without it, love is merely obsession, selfish infatuation, or destructive hang-up; sex, nothing more than a pleasure balloon, popping
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when the moment passes. Well-fed ba-bies and animals can die without in-timacy—emotionally starved to death.
In this book the authors attempt to show how lack of intimacy constricts relationships and circnmscribes lives. More important, they explore the ways in which a person can relearn the art of intimacy, which he once knew in-stinctively but which has been leached out of him in childhood. In doing so they draw heavily on methods devel-oped by Encounter Groups, as well as on the work of Masters and Johnson. They alsó explain the use of the "bio-loop"—the recently developed method of controlling mentally what had pre-viously been thought of as auton-omous bodily functions.
In addition, the authors have pre-pared a guide for determining one's intimacy potential, thus equipping the reader with the self-knowledge re-quired to achieve the ultimate plea-sures of a truly intimate relationship. Vissza