Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies
Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies Books
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Product Description
A celebrated psychoanalyst offers a sneak peek into our sexual fantasies–and surprising revelations about the impact they have on our lives.
Based on the largest-ever survey of sexual fantasies, and drawing on the author’s twenty-five years of clinical do, this “anatomy of secret desire” does for sexual fantasy what Kinsey did for sexual behavior. But, unlike Kinsey’s books, which were nearly unreadably dense and data-driven, Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head? features narrative accounts of sexual fantasies and the author’s own insightful interpretations of how those fantasies affect our lives. Kahr reveals the surprising truth behind secrecy, shame and taboo, and demonstrates how sex fantasies ply a more powerful influence on our emotions, behavior, and relationships than we ever imagined.
Kahr’s insights are liberating. He tells us the tale of Margaret, who, in mining early sexual abuse for arousing and nourishing sexual fantasies: “succeeded brilliantly in turning a childhood trauma into an adult triumph.” He clarifies how he helped a young man who couldn’t get turned on by his gorgeous girlfriend but only by dominatrix-themed porn, and how numerous men and women used fantasy to become more intimate with their partners–or to be unfaithful or even cruel to them instead. Ultimately, by unmasking the myths and destroying the guilt and ignorance surrounding sexual fantasy, Kahr offers readers a opportunity to lead richer and less conflicted lives.
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I found this writing to be very dry and judgemental. Much of what was said was hardly new knowledge or failed to come to any conclusion at all. I have to admit I did not read it through as once I got past the first few chapters I skipped nearly looking for some hope. This is probably excellent for some, but just wasn’t what I was looking for. There’s also much too much introduction before even the slightest top.
Rating: 1 / 5
Most of the fantasies in the book are honestly mundane–a woman sleeps with a woman, a man cheats on his wife–and like many books about sexual fantasies, it’s unclear if the reader is supposed to be reading it objectively for in rank or subjectively for titillation. I didn’t end the book, frankly, because I felt I wasn’t learning anything from it. Still, the author did a lot of work to legitimize it, so he gets stars for effort.
Rating: 3 / 5
As other reviewers have rightly pointed out, if you have any doubt that your sexual fantasies may be odd, if not `perverted’ and, frequently, that you are the only one to have them, Brett Kahr’s Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head will no doubt comfort you.
Kahr here presents a veritable smorgasbord of the human sexual thoughts, from the tamest sexual fantasy (“I fantasise about making like to my wife’) to what some might arguably reckon is sincerely disturbing, and messed up.
But, if you are hoping, as I was, for a sustained analysis of the origins of our sexual fantasies, you may find Kahr’s exposé wanting in several respects.
First off, Kahr is not only a psychoanalyst, but his admiration for Freud, which he gleefully shares as early as he can in his book, soon limits on veritable admiration. But more annoying still is the ease with which he aligns himself with the supposed brilliance of the Viennese patriarch. Applied to the interpretation of sexual fantasies, the whole thing becomes downright frustrating.
There is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy in Freudian thought; to use it’s own jargon, something that smacks of wish-fulfillment. Psychoanalytic interpretations have the nearly inevitable tendency of apt circular arguments: we know this is why people do this or that; they do this or that; therefore, our interpretations are aptly. (The most well-known example of this was Freud’s belief that the very resistance he had encountered to his life’s work was proof that he was aptly. Then again, you have to admire someone with that much self-confidence.) To this day, Freudian theories remain improvable. I do not doubt that, in the clinical setting, they have helped countless, but that does not necessarily make every one of its interpretations right, or the only plausible one. Throughout Kahr’s book, there is small if any attempt to presume any other motivation behind his subjects’ psychic, sexual scripts besides what the canon of psychoanalytic interpretations offers him. Eventually, we are left feeling that Kahr is stuck in an interpretive rut and it soon gets a bit too repetitive: example after example of the supposedly same expression of mental turmoil.
And then, there is the writing itself. Although Kahr is a clad wordsmith, someone at Basic Books absolutely dropped the ball.
Kahr starts his book by telling us that, 1) most people have sexual fantasies; 2) fantasies can be excellent or terrible but that, 3) most people feel terrible about their own and, 4) sexual fantasies find their source in one’s early-life history. Kahr unfortunately takes over one hundred pages to bestow us with these nearly self-evident truths. Part II, which comprises a full third of the book, presents us a litany of sexual fantasies but does nothing more than Nancy Friday had already done forty years earlier. You have to wait 266 pages before Part III and any sustained analysis of the origins, purpose, and effect of sexual fantasies. As if that wasn’t enough, even in his own discussion Kahr also presents page after page of his theme’s sexual fantasies (or, in some instances, absence thereof), then spends near as much time attempting to sum them up only to simply do again them.
Kahr also has a tendency of coming off apart every one of his thoughts, examples and interpretations to a sometimes ridiculous level. “Overwritten” barely describes large parts of his book. Even as reading these endless passages, I was often left thought, “Yes, yes! Get on with it!” The whole things leaves one with the feeling of an author who may be a bit too self-absorbed with his ability not only to interpret anything but to reckon at all. Kahr’s editor (if he had one, something one starts to doubt quite early on in the reading) may possibly have cut the book down by a third, possibly even a half, without loosing anything.
In the end, if you feel you are lonely with your occasional, sexual daydreams, Kahr’s book will no doubt reassure you that you are not. But, I must admit that I am absolutely dismayed that, still today, so many reckon there might be something incorrect with them for having this or that sexual fantasy, or thought that they are the only one having them. Alfred Kinsey’s published his stereotype-busting research on American’s sex lives some six decades ago, and Nancy Friday added to this picture in the early 1970s. How long will it take us to accept ourselves as we are.
If, but, the breadth of human sexual fantasies is no longer new to you and you are looking for a solid (if but skewed) discussion of the reasons why we harbour this or that sexual fantasy, you may want to arm yourself with a small patience or, as I did not half-way through Part I, simply go honest to the index to find what you are looking for. You will not loose anything in the reading.
I give Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head three stars, if only for Kahr’s admirable effort in culling data from over 20,000 research subjects.
Rating: 3 / 5
Brett Kahr
Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head?
The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies
(New York: Basic Books: [...], 2008) 493 pages
(ISBN: 978-0-465-03766-7; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: BF692.K27 2008)
A British shrink who has studied sexual fantasies
on both side of the Atlantic Ocean–in the UK and the USA–
takes us on a fascinating tour of the hidden parts of the human mind.
This book is based on extensive interviews with several hundred subjects
plus surveys of several thousand others.
Nearly all of the subjects were recruited from the general broadcast.
The subjects were not psychotherapy clients.
As such, it might be the most extensive study of human sexual fantasies.
No dramatic new in rank is uncovered,
but this book does explore all of the most common sexual fantasies.
The author is a Freudian, but this does not distort his data.
He spends many pages trying to find the causes of sexual fantasies
in the childhood experiences of the subjects.
And in many cases, traumatic events from childhood
do seem to be the basic causes of adult sexual fantasies.
Many of the subjects had never mutual their sexual fantasies with anyone else.
No general theory of sexual fantasies emerges from this study.
But the gathered data may possibly be used by future researchers
who might be able to develop comprehensive explanations.
The author’s research also continues.
This would be a excellent place for anyone to start reading about sexual fantasies.
If you wish to read other books on sexual fantasies,
search the Internet for the following precise words:
“SEXUAL FANTASIES—best books”.
James Leonard Park, author of
Imprinted Sexual Fantasies: A New Key for Sexology.
Rating: 4 / 5
Loved this read a lot. This is a fantastic mix of psychology and just fun erotica. For every odd or uncomfortable fantasy there is a plotting provoking analysis.
It was very fascinating and offers a lot of insight into sexual fantasies and their purpose in the human psyche.
Rating: 4 / 5