Despite the fact that therapy offers a seemingly confidential and safe space, details of sexual life very often remain obscure and may never even come to light. How can we explain this, and what can we learn from those practitioners and researchers who adopt a more direct approach towards sexuality? Can what we learn from them help us in our practice and shed light on many of the problems and impasses that we try to address?

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. He is the author of several books including: ‘Why do women write more letters than they post?’; ‘Freud’s Footnotes’; ‘Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing’; ‘Why do people get ill?’ (with David Corfield) , ‘The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression’, ‘What is Madness?’ , ‘Strictly Bipolar’, ‘Hands’, ‘Why Can’t We Sleep? (2019), ‘Jouissance; Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction’, (2021) and ‘is It Ever Just Sex?’ (2023).  He writes frequently about contemporary art .