Existential Sex Therapy
Dr. Genevieve Marcel explores the intersection of existential philosophy and the psychology of sexuality, while considering what desire reveals about the self. Her writing explores how to work with clients through existential sex therapy and pursues that same inquiry through theory: the way wanting and being wanted reorganize identity, the fear of being known in intimacy and the structures of recognition that shape how people move toward and away from one another.
Publications
The article "The Retreat of Desire: Belonging, Isolation and the Sexual Lives of Women" was published in Sexual and Relationship Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor and Francis.
Her book, Existential Sex Therapy for Women, is currently under publisher contract with Routledge, Taylor & Francis. It offers the first clinical and theoretical frameworks of female sexuality through an existential lens, drawing on the philosophical lineage of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Barker and Kleinplatz to reframe sexual experience as a site of meaning, freedom, authenticity and encounter rather than symptom or dysfunction.
Further books are underway, including Desire, a theoretical work on wanting and being wanted, alongside The Vicious Garden, her first work of fiction.
Dr. Genevieve Marcel
PhD in Clinical Sexology | MA Clinical Psychology | BS Microbiology | Board Certified Diplomate of Sexology
Formation
Dr. Marcel holds a PhD in Clinical Sexology, awarded with distinction, a master of arts in Clinical Psychology from Pepperdine University and a bachelor of science in Microbiology with Honors from the University of Arkansas. She is a Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Sexology, a member of AASECT and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and a Licensed Professional Counselor Associate in Texas (consultation & supervision with Tammy Fisher, LPC-S, CST).
Her intellectual formation draws as much from existential philosophy and literature as from clinical training. The writers and thinkers who shaped her thinking most durably include Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Frankl, Peggy Kleinplatz and Meg Barker.
Her work proceeds from a single conviction: that the inner life of sexuality is one of the most revealing and least examined dimensions of how a person is actually living.