Many theories exist in trying to explain the reason for a woman’s lack of sexual desire, with various treatments that are being studied and suggested to revive one’s sexual desire. In Reclaiming Your Sexual Self: How You Can Bring Desire Back into Your Life, Hall uses a psychosocial approach to explain why one might lose their sexual desire and how they can reclaim it on their own. The focus of this paper will be to demonstrate the lack of empirical evidence in Hall’s recommendations. Beginning with a brief summary of Hall’s recommendations, empirical studies will be presented to demonstrate why the anecdotal experiences of patients is not sufficient without scientific data. Studies will be presented to demonstrate the important of conducting empirical studies.
Hall discusses the lack of sexual desire amongst women due to an imbalance in their lives. She focuses on eight areas in one’s life that can cause sexual disinterest which include control and power, intimacy, sexual self-esteem, stress, unresolved anger, sexual dysfunction, trauma and abuse (Hall, …show more content…
Since Hall discusses lack of sexual desire in terms of desire itself, it will be referred to as Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) from the fourth version of the DSM in this paper. HSDD is known to have a multi-factorial etiology since there are numerous biological, psychological and social factors that can cause the loss of desire (Ullery, Millner, & Willingham, 2002). Hormonal changes, abuse, stress and so forth are all possible explanations for a woman to lose her sexual desire. In the second chapter. Hall briefly discusses physical reasons to why one may lose their sexual desire. However, she does not further investigate the potential biological explanations for the loss of