Customer Reviews

Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a lengthy and informative look at both the psychology of sexual fantasies and a compilation of common fantasies by category. It is very readable, interesting and sheds light on the unconscious processes that give rise to all kinds of sexual fantasies.

While I didn't count the actual pages, I would estimate that approximately 100 pages is on underlying psychology with the remainder of the book comprised of the fantasies themselves. If you have ever wondered whether what you are thinking is typical, normal or unusual... you may get a lot out of reading this.

I have done psychological research in this area and I also have a graduate background in biology. In my opinion, the best concise book on this topic is The Erotic Mind: Unlocking the Inner Sources of Passion and Fulfillment. I found this title complementary and ideally for a topic as complete as this you would almost certainly want to read both.

Although this book... The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating is NOT directly about this area, it provides context, more information on some of the underlying evolutionary hardwiring and is also complementary to this title.

If you have read Nancy Friday's books. You will find the general format of this book familiar. However, this author goes more in-depth and this is certainly a bit heavier, but equally interesting and perhaps more interesting than the many books by Nancy Friday. In fact, I would classify Nancy Friday's titles as primarily erotica with a secondary focus on underlying psychology.

Given the breadth of the research by this author, I give the book as solid nod in terms of its significance. I didn't always agree with the interpretation of the data, but the interpretations were reasonable and always had some merit.

In summary, this is a medium light read accessible to layperson's and professionals. It is primarily a book of sexual fantasies with a respectable amount of explanatory material. It is fascinating, well written and lacks a strong academic tone. It is readable and sometimes titillating as well as informative.

I think that most people have sex lives that they are fairly happy with, and it surprises me to learn that 90% of the people out there are sexual fantasists, routinely screening some sort of interior porn film in their heads just for the sake of getting off. If you ever feel ashamed of having such fantasies, prepare to have an uplifting experience in reading _Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head? The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies_ (Basic Books) by Brett Kahr. The author is a psychotherapist working for over twenty years in a fairly classical Freudian tradition, but in 2003 he began to add to his clinical experience of fantasies by means of the British Sexual Fantasy Research Project, which eventually included American subjects as well, some twenty thousand subjects in total. Some of the research was done by exhaustive five-hour interviews and some was done on-line; the project is continuing, and the book includes the web address for participation if you'd like to help with some interesting research. And it is interesting. Many pages in this big book are devoted to verbatim reports of fantasies, which Kahr warns will cause in readers either sexual arousal or embarrassment; he could also have included shock and also laughter, for no one else has fantasies like your own, and the fantasies of those _other_ people, well, they can be downright weird. That so many people participate in this hidden activity must mean that it does something for our species, and for our sex lives, and besides commenting on the general purpose of fantasies, Kahr analyzes their purpose and meaning for individuals in many cases. His explanations are generally Freudian, of course, but explained with a minimum of jargon and with a high degree of humane concern and with good humor that makes the book delightful as well as instructive reading.

The fantasies are broken into categories for chapters, devoted to subjects like group sex, infidelity, sex with celebrities, homosexual encounters, violence, humiliation, and so on. These are fantasies held by people who are not psychiatric patients or prisoners, just regular folks. Not all the fantasies can be described in a family-friendly review like this one, but here is a quick description of some of them. A woman imagines that her boss declares that today is Sex Friday, and everyone can have sex with whoever seems desirable. Another woman imagines Saddam Hussein having her "really really hard and just treated like a piece of meat". Another wants to be squeezed between the thighs of Serena Williams. Many fantasies are almost rated PG: "Seeing my wife naked" or "Being alone without the children." Others involve specific X-ratings, for they have been borrowed from porn: "About being in a porn film and being watched whilst I am made to perform sexual acts." There are plenty of distressingly violent fantasies here, but more of them are simply odd. "After nearly a quarter of a century of clinical practice," writes Kahr, "I sometimes believe that I have heard every possible fantasy imaginable, until of course the next patient comes along and reveals an erotic fantasy that I never knew existed." Even with all this data, he has plenty of puzzling questions, like whether it is we who control our fantasies or vice versa. He admits that there is controversy over the issue, but thinks that generally we cannot control fantasies, especially since he has seen many people who try but cannot get rid of fantasies brought on by religious or parental prohibitions or sexual abuse.

Learning more about fantasies might even have practical application; I think Kahr is not half joking when he suggests that matchmaking services might incorporate potential partners' sexual fantasies as a criterion for a match's fitness. "Such factors may prove to be much more pertinent to compatibility than whether one enjoys films, eating out, and country walks." This humane, erudite, and thoughtful book, however, ought to have even more practical value in allowing us to regard our fellow creatures with increased sympathy and understanding. Think, for instance, of the twenty-year-old woman who blushed when she told Kahr that she had a "very perverse" fantasy that she knew would disgust him. Kahr says he braced himself, but found that she was talking about her fantasy of making love to a lecturer at her university. "Isn't that awful?" she explained. "I'm trying to get over it, but he's just so cute." Kahr gently wonders, along with the reader, if she might read this volume and, seeing how perverse (whatever that might mean) some fantasies truly are, whether she might come to view her own as a little more acceptable, playful, and fun. His explanations of the kinkiest of these visions provide a unique service in showing that all we fantasists are not so different from one another, and that it's a good bet that all of us are at least a little kinky.

I loved this book as it normalizes the sexual fantasies we have in our head by helping to understand the nonsexual narrative it reveals about ourselves. Sexual fantasies are not separate from who were are--they are stories which are coded erotically. Cracking the code helps us reveal our innermost selves.

If you struggle with sexual fantasies and thoughts and/or wish to understand what they say about you, then this is the book!

As other reviewers have rightly pointed out, if you have any doubt that your sexual fantasies may be odd, if not `perverted' and, mostly, that you are the only one to have them, Brett Kahr's Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head will no doubt comfort you.

Kahr here presents a veritable smorgasbord of the human sexual imagination, from the tamest sexual fantasy ("I fantasise about making love to my wife') to what some might arguably think is seriously disturbing, and disturbed.

However, if you are hoping, as I was, for a sustained analysis of the origins of our sexual fantasies, you may find Kahr's exposé wanting in several respects.

First off, Kahr is not only a psychoanalyst, but his admiration for Freud, which he gleefully shares as early as he can in his book, soon borders on veritable idolatry. But more annoying still is the ease with which he aligns himself with the supposed brilliance of the Viennese patriarch. Applied to the interpretation of sexual fantasies, the whole thing becomes downright frustrating.

There is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy in Freudian thinking; to use it's own jargon, something that smacks of wish-fulfillment. Psychoanalytic interpretations have the almost inevitable tendency of becoming circular arguments: we know this is why people do this or that; they do this or that; therefore, our interpretations are right. (The most famous example of this was Freud's belief that the very resistance he had encountered to his life's work was proof that he was right. Then again, you have to admire someone with that much self-confidence.) To this day, Freudian theories remain improvable. I do not doubt that, in the clinical setting, they have helped countless, but that does not necessarily make every one of its interpretations correct, or the only plausible one. Throughout Kahr's book, there is little if any attempt to imagine any other motivation behind his subjects' psychic, sexual scripts besides what the canon of psychoanalytic interpretations offers him. Eventually, we are left feeling that Kahr is stuck in an interpretive rut and it soon gets a bit too repetitive: example after example of the supposedly same expression of mental turmoil.

And then, there is the writing itself. Although Kahr is a decent wordsmith, someone at Basic Books completely dropped the ball.

Kahr begins his book by telling us that, 1) most people have sexual fantasies; 2) fantasies can be good or bad but that, 3) most people feel bad about their own and, 4) sexual fantasies find their source in one's early-life history. Kahr unfortunately takes over one hundred pages to present us with these almost self-evident truths. Part II, which comprises a full third of the book, presents us a litany of sexual fantasies but does nothing more than Nancy Friday had already done forty years earlier. You have to wait 266 pages before Part III and any sustained analysis of the origins, purpose, and effect of sexual fantasies. As if that wasn't enough, even in his own discussion Kahr also presents page after page of his subject's sexual fantasies (or, in some instances, absence thereof), then spends nearly as much time attempting to sum them up only to simply repeat them.

Kahr also has a tendency of peeling apart every one of his ideas, examples and interpretations to a sometimes ridiculous level. "Overwritten" barely describes large portions of his book. While reading these endless passages, I was often left thinking, "Yes, yes! Get on with it!" The whole things leaves one with the feeling of an author who may be a bit too self-absorbed with his ability not only to interpret anything but to think at all. Kahr's editor (if he had one, something one begins to doubt quite early on in the reading) could have cut the book down by a third, possibly even a half, without loosing anything.

In the end, if you feel you are alone with your occasional, sexual daydreams, Kahr's book will no doubt reassure you that you are not. However, I must admit that I am absolutely dismayed that, still today, so many think there might be something wrong with them for having this or that sexual fantasy, or thinking that they are the only one having them. Alfred Kinsey's published his stereotype-busting research on American's sex lives some six decades ago, and Nancy Friday added to this picture in the early 1970s. How long will it take us to accept ourselves as we are.

If, however, the breadth of human sexual fantasies is no longer new to you and you are looking for a solid (if however skewed) discussion of the reasons why we harbour this or that sexual fantasy, you may want to arm yourself with a little patience or, as I did not half-way through Part I, simply go straight to the index to find what you are looking for. You will not loose anything in the reading.

I give Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head three stars, if only for Kahr's admirable effort in culling data from over 20,000 research subjects.

I'm reading this book to assist me with a research report for my Sex Therapy class in my PsyD program. This book is amazing! I can't put it down. When doing research, I usually just take what I need. Not with this book - I began at page 1 and kept going straight through. The author really did his homework before writing this book. It touches on everything from the history of psychoanalysis and fantasies to individual experiences, to analysis of individual fantasies. i never realized that there was so much unconscious information and experiences from childhood that help create sexual fantasies. It's a favorite in my personal library!

This is a book largely without a purpose. I bought the book because it was supposed to contain a lot of sexual fantasies of rather normal people. I was just curious. However, there is something seriously wrong in the data collection procedure. I do not for a second believe that these fantasies described in any way are representative for normal people. First they are often very general (e.g. I dream of lesbian sex). Second they are often very plain (e.g. be submissive and having doggy style). The author states that he isn't judgemental, but then he seems to believe that having a rape fantasy is perverse. I honestly think that people have quite vivid fantasies, which often can involve violence. However, due to the data collection procedure I don't think people are willing to tell the author this kind of information in a web-based survey form. (He would have been better off doing in-depth interviews and actually gaining his informants trust.) The author is certainly very uncomfortable addressing these more thorny matters. That is not what I would have expected.

I think this book in the future will be a good example of what sexual fantasies were considered kind of politically correct/acceptable around the turn of the century. Our grandchildren will be slightly amused how innocent everything seemed to be.

This book covers a lot of important information for people/couples to consider. I use this book as a tool in psychotherapy homework planning and so much more is is revealed as people try to make sense of what they want or hope to expect. The book covers EVERYTHING!

I like to have books out on my coffee table at any time to annoy the Philistines when they come over,and this is a good one for that. It really will bother everyone. Either people pick it up and expect it to be smut and find instead science, or they are prudish religious types and just make a face and then judge me silently for the rest of the evening without looking inside the book at all. How can you lose? And if you actually read it, I think you may find it fascinating. I was disappointed only that the most "disburbing" fantasies were censored so as not to tramautize anyone, as the author noted at one point. But I found decapitation fantasy art and cannibal fetish comic books through google within 2 minutes of attempting to, as supplementary research. Why exactly would I have picked up the book if I did not want to get into the subject? I wanted the whole gamut; to know what people fantasize about and how many people fantasize about what. The data also was scant there. You will get some statistics that 3 out of 4... or 90 percent... and so on, but I would have liked some more creative use of stats, such as a chart of top Celebrities Most Often Fantasized About, or Top 10 Fantasies Involving Food. You know, useless but light-hearted additions to a serious text. The author is a Freudian but that only bothered me in one instance when he tried Freudian hindsight analysis on a participant who was anti-Freudian analysis. This book is a fine introduction. Operates more on the level of education than entertainment, curiosity more than kinkiness, and sad to discover, most people are no more creative in their dreams than they are in their lives. However, there are Vikings and Poets of sexual fantasies too. Some choice few of the included fantasies were exotic delicacies to read. I laughed, I gasped, etcetera. There are a few real fine princes and princesses of freaks out there. But I'd have to expect my fantasies would have been some of the censored ones.

Brett Kahr
Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?
The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies

(New York: Basic Books: [...], 2008) 493 pages
(ISBN: 978-0-465-03766-7; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: BF692.K27 2008)

A British psychotherapist who has studied sexual fantasies
on both side of the Atlantic Ocean--in the UK and the USA--
takes us on a fascinating tour of the hidden parts of the human mind.

This book is based on extensive interviews with several hundred subjects
plus surveys of several thousand others.
Almost all of the subjects were recruited from the general public.
The subjects were not psychotherapy clients.
As such, it might be the most extensive study of human sexual fantasies.

No dramatic new information is uncovered,
but this book does explore all of the most common sexual fantasies.

The author is a Freudian, but this does not distort his data.
He spends many pages trying to find the causes of sexual fantasies
in the childhood experiences of the subjects.
And in many cases, traumatic events from childhood
do seem to be the basic causes of adult sexual fantasies.

Many of the subjects had never shared their sexual fantasies with anyone else.

No general theory of sexual fantasies emerges from this study.
But the gathered data could be used by future researchers
who might be able to develop comprehensive explanations.
The author's research also continues.

This would be a good place for anyone to begin reading about sexual fantasies.

If you wish to read other books on sexual fantasies,
search the Internet for the following precise words:
"SEXUAL FANTASIES---best books".

James Leonard Park, author of
Imprinted Sexual Fantasies: A New Key for Sexology.

Enjoyed this read a lot. This is a great mix of psychology and just fun erotica. For every odd or uncomfortable fantasy there is a thought provoking analysis.
It was very interesting and offers a lot of insight into sexual fantasies and their purpose in the human psyche.