Satisfaction: Women, Sex, and the Quest for Intimacy

Claiming that millions of American women in all ethnic, cultural and economic groups are dissatisfied with their sex lives, psychiatrist Clayton urges readers to "min[e] the vein of gold that is your sexual self." Patient case studies include a thrice-divorced woman whose fear of abandonment plunges her into affairs with bad guys when she's married to good ones, and a lesbian whose sexual attraction to a straight, married colleague is symptomatic of intimacy problems stemming from abandonment by her mother. Aided by freelance writer Cantor-Cooke, Clayton also demonstrates how a doctoral student worked out an Oedipal conflict through her affair with an older professor who eventually threw her over for his wife, a Chinese dissident finally allowed to emigrate to the U.S., and how a college student who, claiming she was unaware that she had been pregnant, left her newborn to die of exposure in a toilet was unprepared for a sexual relationship because her identity was bound up in her Catholic upbringing. Although much of Clayton's relationship advice is sound, it's also familiar and readily available in countless other volumes, and Clayton casts too wide a net as she ranges from medical disorders that cause sexual dysfunction to women's attitudes toward pregnancy and sex. (Jan. 9)