Psychology Space

VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: Language on this site is sexual in nature. Not recommended for younger or sensitive viewers.
I’m Krista. Welcome to The Psychology of Sex website for both women and men.

I don’t know about you, but I used to have very mixed feelings about sex and/or a relationship with someone else. When I was in counseling, my therapist would say this is normal for everyone. “Sometimes you want it, sometimes you don’t,” she’d say.

Then I’d chime in: “and sometimes you want it with someone else and other times, you’re better off alone.”

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Most of us emerged from childhood
believing that romantic love is a natural phenomenon.
When we ‘fall in love’, we seem to be possessed
by an irresistible passion, filling our hearts.
So, how could these romantic feelings be a cultural creation,
invented only 800 years ago?

Before the Middle Ages, some people probably experienced
exaggerated, fantasy feelings close to what we now call “romantic love”.
But such accidental eruptions of personal, deluded feelings
did not become the passion of the masses
until the French troubadours refined and spread the emotional game of love.

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One of Freud’s early disciples, Melanie Klein, took up the task of applying the techniques of psychoanalysis to children. She considered her work a natural extension of Freud’s theories, rather than any sort of innovation in psychoanalysis; still, she met considerable criticism from her psychoanalytic colleagues. And rightly so, for her work is characterized by speculative and fantastic explanations of, well, infant fantasy.

Nevertheless, Klein did bring to light the “ugly” side of infant development, for she saw in infants a mass of angry and hostile impulses toward the mother when the infant did not get its needs met. In essence, the infant constantly flip-flops between love and hate: love when its needs are met, and hate when its needs are ignored or frustrated. In her work, Klein tried to explain the process by which the infant seeks to repair the damage of its hostility to its mother. In fact, the titles of two of her most significant collections of works, Envy and Gratitude and Love, Guilt, and Reparation, tell the story almost as well as the writings themselves.

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Believe it or not, most of us are brought up in modern culture to fear love. This is a radical statement, so pause a bit and consider it.

How often were you, as a child, criticized and laughed at for expressing your honest feelings? How often are you now used, in our culture of merchandising, as an object to be manipulated in order to satisfy some other person’s desire for profit and power? How often do you shape yourself—with diets, implants, workouts, jewelry, tattoos, makeup, hair dye, and clothing—to meet the expectations of someone’s desire?

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Most persons don’t realize this, but the common, or popular, view of love involves an element of receiving something. “I love chocolate” really means that “I enjoy getting the experience of the taste of chocolate.” Similarly, “I love you” commonly implies “I enjoy touching your body,” or “I enjoy believing that you will give me security or protection,” or “I enjoy having sex with you” (or “I want to have sex with you.” As a result, Lacan, in his teachings about love, described the typical act of love as “polymorphous perversion.”

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The gap where an electrical signal jumps from one neuron to another is called the synaptic cleft. This is a closeup of the cleft between one neuron and another.

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Want to earn your degree in clinical psychology? Browse our featured clinical psychology schools, read detailed fact sheets about their programs, then request information directly from the schools that interest you.

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Psychology School Search

Psychologyschoolssearch.com helps you quickly find the right psychology schools for you. Read school profiles and connect directly with schools for more information.
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VIENNA, Austria — Dr. Heinrich Gross, a psychiatrist who worked at a clinic where the Nazis killed and conducted cruel experiments on thousands of children, died Dec. 15, his family announced Thursday. He was 90.
Gross, who was implicated in nine deaths as part of a Nazi plot to eliminate “worthless lives,” had escaped trial in March after a court ruled he suffered from severe dementia. No cause of death was given in a brief statement issued by his family.
Gross was a leading doctor in Vienna’s infamous Am Spiegelgrund clinic. Historians and survivors of the clinic had accused him of killing or taking part in the clinic’s experiments on thousands of children deemed by the Nazis to be physically, mentally or otherwise unfit for Adolf Hitler’s vision of a perfect world.

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A Simulation Study of the
Psychology of Imprisonment
Conducted at Stanford University.
Welcome to the Stanford Prison Experiment web site, which features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment, including parallels with the recent abuse of Iraqi prisoners. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University
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