Abstract

This paper explores the epistemology and methodology for describing sexual/erotic desire in women. Culture provides a variety of discourses which create possibilities for individual agents to think, experience and act. This paper outlines the dominant discourses of sexuality. The main focus is on the emerging psychodynamic understanding of erotic desire as a cultivated way of experiencing and expressing intersubjective embodied desire. The story of a female research participant has been selected to illustrate the journey from undifferentiated physical and mental experiences of desire to the peculiar integration of both aspects in her lived experience. A combination of interpretive methods is employed.