Existential Sex Therapy: Reading Desire as Existential Information (2 CE Hours, 2026)

Description:

This course offers clinicians an existential framework for understanding low and absent desire, not as dysfunction to be corrected, but as a form of psychological communication. Drawing on existential philosophy and clinical practice with women, the course reframes desire as information: a signal of what freedom, isolation, responsibility, meaning, mortality and authenticity are doing to a woman’s inner life. Clinicians will leave with a working conceptual model and concrete reframing language they can apply directly in session.

Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Explain the difference between the dysfunction model’s treatment of desire as a deficit from the existential model’s treatment of desire as communication.

2. Explain how each of the five existential themes, freedom, isolation, meaning, mortality and authenticity, manifests as a specific shift in a woman’s desire.

3. Describe how to apply the two existential reframing questions to a presenting complaint of low or absent desire in clinical practice.

Activity Schedule

Opening: The Limits of the Dysfunction Model (10 minutes)

Introduce the central clinical problem: a woman presents with nothing measurably wrong, yet feels broken. Establish the reframe that organizes the course: desire treated as information rather than malfunction.

Foundational Distinction: What Makes Sex Existential (15 minutes)

Differentiate a deficit model, something to fix, from a meaning model, something to interpret. Introduce the five existential themes as the architecture for the remainder of the session.

Introduce a practical diagnostic tool clinicians can use before applying the framework: three questions, drawn from values-based assessment, that efficiently surface which existential theme is most active for a given client. What brings her joy. What reliably makes her angry. Who she admires, and why. Joy tends to point toward authentic, but under-protected values. Anger reveals where a value has been violated or repeatedly sacrificed. Admiration reflects a value the client longs to embody or believes she is not permitted to embody. Taken together, these questions locate the existential terrain a clinician can listen for as the five movements unfold.

Five Clinical Movements (72 minutes, approximately 14 to 15 minutes each)

Each movement pairs a brief conceptual frame and clinical illustration with two corresponding reframing questions clinicians can use directly in session.

Freedom and Its Accompanying Responsibility: desire collapsing under obligation, the woman who freezes when finally asked what she wants and the body’s quieter refusal to keep authoring a life the self has stopped owning, the bad faith of treating a chosen life as something that simply happened.

Isolation: desire withdrawing not from absence of love, but from the terror of being alone, the woman who stays because leaving feels more dangerous than disappearing inside the relationship.

Meaning: desire as communication; the gap between what sex is supposed to give and what it actually delivers.

Mortality: desire as urgency or avoidance in the face of finitude, aging and loss.

Authenticity: desire as a byproduct of self-truth rather than a goal achieved through intervention. This closing theme gathers the preceding four into a single organizing principle.

Synthesis and Application (15 minutes)

Participants apply the framework to a single composite presenting complaint, a woman whose desire has quietly diminished in the eighteen months since moving in with her partner, with nothing she can clearly name as wrong. The case is deliberately ambiguous, sitting at the intersection of freedom, responsibility, isolation and meaning rather than pointing cleanly toward a single theme. After the case is presented, a live Zoom poll asks participants which of the five existential themes they hear operating most strongly, surfacing where the room’s reads diverge in real time. The presenter then synthesizes two or three competing reads and validates that more than one theme can be legitimately active in the same presentation. The exercise closes by demonstrating how a clinician chooses an entry point with a client rather than diagnosing one in isolation, modeling the underlying posture of existential work: provisional, attentive and willing to revise.

Q&A and Close (10 minutes)

Open discussion, with particular attention to how participants might apply this framework within their own caseloads.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Genevieve Marcel is a board certified Clinical Sexology Diplomate and Licensed Professional Counselor Associate whose clinical work centers onexistential approaches to women’s sexuality, desire and intimacy.

She holds a PhD in Clinical Sexology, completed with distinction, through Modern Sex Therapy Institutes, and a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology from Pepperdine University.

Her forthcoming clinical manuscript, Existential Sex Therapy for Women: A Meaning-Centered Approach, applies existential psychotherapy to women’s sexual distress. The manuscript is under contract with Routledge, Taylor and Francis.

In her private practice, she works individually with women on questions of desire, meaning and authenticity, treating sexual presenting complaints not as dysfunction to be corrected, but as existential information to be understood.

Class originally recorded: upcoming

Social workers completing this course receive 2 general continuing education credits.