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This is the second in a series of volumes describing what Helen Singer Kaplan calls "the new sex therapy." Her first volume described the "active treatment of sexual dysfunctions." While this volume briefly reviews what is encompassed in the new sex therapy, including the treatment of sexual dysfunctions, it concentrates on a newly defined entity called "disorders of sexual desire."
The author's treatment approach is based on viewing the human sexual response as "composed of three separate but interlocking phases which are each vulnerable to disruption in a specific manner by multiple physical and psychic pathogens, and which produce a variety of disorders which are responsive to specific and rational treatment strategies" (p. 4). These phases are derived from applying Masters and Johnson's description of the sexual response "as a natural biologic function," which was derived from observing "male and female sexual behavior accurately under the same kind of laboratory conditions which serve the study of other biological systems such as digestive and respiratory physiology" (p. 5).
In The New Sex Therapy, disturbances of sexual functioning are viewed as inhibitions affecting specific "circuits" or "wiring" that involve the three phases of the sexual response. These three phases are considered to be physiologically related but discrete, making for distinct disturbances of desire, excitement, and orgasm. According to Kaplan, "Certain kinds of trauma, if sufficiently intense, disturb the entire system, but often only one component is disrupted. One set of causes is likely to 'blow the fuses' of the orgasm circuits, another type of conflict may 'disconnect the erection wires' while a diffuse group of variables is likely to cause interference in the 'libido circuits' of the brain" (p. 6).
This rather simplified, mechanistic view of genital sexual functioning, with its implied foundation in a common-sense and obvious neurophysiological substrate, is presented as an accep