The Birth of Pleasure

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: A Radical Geography of Love
For years, without knowing why, I have been drawn to maps of the desert, drawn by descriptions of the winds and the wadi - dry watercourses that suddenly fill with rain. I began following an ancient story about love told in North Africa

Chapter 1: A Radical Geography of Love : Part 2
I was searching at the time for what seemed a washed-out road connecting women's psychology with that of girls. It was a path that novelists had followed but psychologists for the most part had ignored, girls having been consistently left out of research

Carol Gilligan, whose classic In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now offers a brilliant, provocative book about love. Why is love so often associated with tragedy, she asks. Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns?

Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare's plays and Freud's case histories, to Anne Frank's diaries and contemporary novels. Groundbreaking and immensely readable, The Birth of Pleasure has powerful implications for the way we live and love.

Carol Gilligan is a psychologist and writer who lives in New York City and in the Berkshires. Her ground-breaking book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory' and Women's Development, has been translated into eighteen languages. With her students, she co-authored and co-edited four books on women's psychology and girls' development: Meeting at the Crossroads, Between Voice and Silence, Making Connections, and Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance.

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