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Philippe Jacquet has spent a significant part of his clinical career working with couples — in private practice, in hospital settings, in rehabilitation, in residential treatment. The work is consistent across all those contexts, and so is the moment that most often defines whether it will succeed: the moment when two people stop arguing about whose version of the problem is correct, and begin to look at it together.
People seek intensity. In relationships, in experiences, in therapy itself — there is a pull towards the overwhelming, the dramatic, the all-consuming. Intensity feels like aliveness. It feels like proof that something real is happening.
Philippe Jacquet’s clinical observation, built over decades of practice, is the opposite: intensity is the best enemy of intimacy. The more intense the feeling, the less likely it is that you are actually seeing the person in front of you.
Sex addiction and pornography addiction are not primarily about sex. They are about the management of anxiety, emotion, and intimacy — using sexual behaviour or content to seek connection, intensity, or relief without the vulnerability that real contact requires.
Sex addiction rarely arrives alone. The person presenting with compulsive sexual behaviour is frequently also using cocaine. This is not coincidence — it is neurochemistry.