Brett Kahr - Whos been sleeping in your head: the secret world of sexual fantasies

Table of Contents

Also by Brett Kahr

Half a prayer, half a song
nulli secundus.

What a mans mind is, that is what he is.
SAMUEL PEPYS

I guess we all like to know other peoples secrets so that
we can live with our own.
JONATHAN AMES, WAKE UP, SIR!

A Note on Caution and Confidentiality

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Poor Richards Almanack

This book contains a great deal of extremely sexually explicit materialliterally hundreds and hundreds of sexual fantasies. Some of the intimate fantasies reproduced in these pages may shock you; some may disgust you; some may leave you cold and anesthetized; some may invoke a feeling of pity, contempt, or superiority; but some, if not many, of the fantasies may produce titillation or arousal.

These fantasies derive from the inner recesses of the minds of normal, ordinary British and American adultsmen and women, aged eighteen to ninety-plus years old, randomly selected from every British county and every American state, from every social group, from every religious background, and from virtually every profession imaginable, ranging from doctors to dairymen, from bankers to businesswomen, from clerks to clerics, from the overworked to the unemployed. Although a very small proportion of the anonymous respondents in this study will have sought the services of mental health professionals in an outpatient setting from time to time, none suffers from an incapacitating psychotic illness; therefore, these fantasies cannot be readily dismissed as the rantings of the emotionally unwell. Every single one of the men and women whose fantasies appear in this book leads a reasonably healthy life. None of the participants resides in either a prison or a psychiatric institution. All of the authors of these fantasies live, at liberty, in the community.

None of these fantasies has ever appeared before in print. These original creations of the British and American mind have remained safely confined inside the heads of the participants in my large-scale research study up until now. In fact, hitherto, approximately 95 percent of the subjects had never revealed their sexual fantasies to another living soul, even to their long-term partnersmarital or otherwiseor to their closest friends.

Some of the participants in this research project submitted their fantasies in writing, while others spoke their fantasies into a mini-disc recording machine; these different methods of data collection account, in large measure, for the wide range of stylistic differences in the fantasies themselves. All of the fantasies appear in their original form; although, in the case of those women and men who submitted their fantasies in writing, I have corrected some spelling errors that might have detracted from the experience of reading; and likewise, I have from time to time inserted some judiciously placed commas and semi-colons, merely to facilitate the flow of the sentences. Otherwise, I have endeavored to preserve precisely the language used by the authors themselves.

One notable change has been made to all the texts: I have altered the names and geographical locations of the contributors in the interests of confidentiality. The extremely frank and forthright sexual fantasies in this book appear with the express written permission of the British and American men and women who generated them. Each of the thousands and thousands of research participants signed an agreement, prepared by one or more specialist lawyers, which would allow me to publish their fantasies, providing that I did not reveal any biographical information that could readily or reasonably identify them. For instance, I would not be permitted to write: This fantasy appears courtesy of Mrs. Jane Doe, a fifty-one-year-old accountant and mother of two who lives at 850 Broadway, Topeka, Kansas. In a great many cases, I never knew the real names of the authors in the first place, particularly of those women and men who responded to a detailed, computer-administered questionnaire that guaranteed anonymity. As for those adults whom I interviewed face-to-face, many of these research participants may well have told me their real names when we first met, and in these instances, I have certainly altered their identities. I remain honor-bound to preserve the confidentiality of those who shared their most intimate thoughts as part of a psychological research project, not only for reasons of clinical confidentiality, but also because at this time, we still treat sexual fantasiesespecially private masturbatory fantasiesas a relatively taboo subject in our cultural discourse. Some of the participants in my interview study may have elected to introduce themselves pseudonymously, giving a false name.

As a Registered Psychotherapist practicing in Great Britain, I have spent many years in full-time clinical practice, and during this time, I have worked with a large number of individuals who have entrusted their most private stories to me. Patients or clients undergoing psychotherapy both demand and deserve complete confidentiality when they seek therapeutic assistance so that they can reveal the full extent of their often troubling histories without fear of reprisal or public exposure. There may be occasions when confidentiality must be breached in order to protect all parties concerned. For instance, if a patient informed me of a well-developed plot to kill the British Sovereign, then my professional Code of Ethics would require me to report this matter to the appropriate authorities. Fortunately, in more than two decades of clinical work, I have not had to do this.

In the spirit of recognizing the importance of privacy, particularly in this era of CCTV footage and Googling, I have refrained from using any detailed sexual fantasies of patients and clients with whom I work or have worked in a formal psychotherapeutic capacity. The consulting room has, of course, served as the indispensable laboratory in which I have learned about the manner and the mechanisms of sexual fantasy. Owing to the strictures of clinical confidentiality, howeverthe very bedrock that allows for secret revelations to emerge in psychoanalytical sessionsthe sexual fantasies of my patients must remain a private matter. Thus, apart from brief, unidentifiable vignettes, all of the stories which follow derive not from my clinical work, but from my research work with individuals who offered their informed consent, and who allowed me to conduct intensive psychodiagnostic research consultations with a view to publishing their fantasies, with the understandable proviso that I would refrain from releasing either their names or their addresses.

Introduction: On the Couch at 7:00 A.M.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Venus and Adonis

For more than twenty years, I have worked as a psychotherapist. In other words, I am one of the tens of thousands of mental health professionals in Great Britain who devotes his or her daytime life to the treatment of people who struggle with, or suffer from, a wide range of psychological problems. I completed a lengthy training and apprenticeship that included both university-based study in clinical theory and research methods and supervised therapeutic work with patients in psychiatric hospitals and community mental-health settings. As part of that training, I also underwent intensive psychoanalysis myself. All of this helped to prepare me for my profession. Though I have studied and worked predominantly in Great Britain, I also undertook a training fellowship in the United States, and I have worked with a large number of American migrs in London; I therefore have experience treating the mental health issues of both Britons and Americans.