Esther Perel

My approach is akin to that of an anthropologist and an explorer. I talk to people, and I listen.

We can hear her practicing a supple kind of literary criticism, on the fly, in front of the authors.

Her ambitions for clients and readers are literary, too — she wants them to develop more plots in their lives, more possibilities. She wants them to live without easy, limiting certainties: “Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.” And the script we have inherited when it comes to infidelity is pitifully narrow, its language cribbed from addiction and criminalization: “Clinicians often label the faithful spouse as the ‘injured party’ and the unfaithful one as the ‘perpetrator.’”

Article