Anything you think you have understood about sexuality deserves to hear this remarkable conversation with Christopher Ryan, PhD., co-author of Sex at Dawn with his wife Cacilda Jetha, MD. Without question two of the most educated and well-researched thinkers, the couple explore the origin and evolutionary nature of human sexuality with a convincing array of interdisciplinary scientific evidence from anthropology, archeology, primatology and a bevy of cross cultural psycho sexual studies which took them 10 years to collect. Gracefully and with compassion they end up debunking almost every belief about human nature and our intimate relationships that most of us hold dear.
Christopher received a BA in English and American literature in 1984 and an MA and Ph.D. in psychology from Saybrook University, in San Francisco, CA twenty years later. He spent the intervening decades traveling around the world, living in unexpected places working at very odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York’s Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research). Somewhere along the way, he decided to pursue doctoral studies in psychology. Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Christopher’s research focused on trying to distinguish the human from the cultural. His doctoral dissertation analyzes the prehistoric roots of human sexuality, and was guided by the world-renowned psychologist, Stanley Krippner.
Cacilda was born in Mozambique to a family that had immigrated two generations earlier from Goa, India. As a child, she fled civil war to Portugal, where she received most of her education and medical training before returning to Mozambique in the late 1980s. A young physician determined to help heal her country, Cacilda spent seven years as the only physician serving some 50,000 people in a vast rural district in the north of the country. While there, Cacilda also conducted research (funded by the World Health Organization) on the sexual behavior of rural Mozambicans in order to help design more effective AIDS prevention efforts.
After almost a decade in Mozambique, Cacilda returned to Portugal, where she completed her medical residency training in both psychiatry and occupational medicine.
She and Christopher currently reside together in Barcelona, Spain, where she is a practicing psychiatrist at Hospital San Joan de Déu and in private practice. She speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish, Catalán, English, and some rusty Tsonga.
I guarantee that you will think twice on what it means to love sexually and at least wonder how to expand the nature of loving relationships in your own life. Genius insight, provocative, funny and enlightening.
