Existential Desire

How Wanting and Being Wanted Reveal the Self

Premise: Desire organizes the Self

Forthcoming

Existential Desire is a clinical theory of desire grounded in existential psychology. It examines what wanting and being wanted do to the self and why desire so often functions as a temporary relief from doubt, isolation and invisibility.

Moving between existential philosophy, phenomenology, cultural observation and selective historical vectors, the book traces desire as a movement toward recognition. Seduction is understood not as manipulation or moral transgression, but as a suspension of existential uncertainty for both the one who wants and the one who is wanted. Within that suspension, the self may feel momentarily real, chosen and less alone.

Structured around the arc of doubt, suspension, mutuality or asymmetry, collapse and aftermath, the book articulates how desire stabilizes identity, how the withdrawal of recognition destabilizes meaning and why recognition operates as an existential currency. Written in a reflective and investigative voice, Existential Desire is not a manual or method, but a conceptual clinical work that offers clinicians and theorists a language for understanding how erotic life reveals the deepest structures of subjectivity.