You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Charles Clay Dahlberg, M.D., was a maverick, known for tackling difficult and cutting-edge subjects. He and Joseph Jaffe received a substantial three-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the use of LSD in psychotherapy, and produced a number of important publications (Dahlberg, 1963, 1967; Dahlberg, Mechaneck, & Feldstein, 1968; Natale, Dahlberg, & Jaffe, 1979). In 1977, after Dahlberg suffered a stroke, he and Jaffe published a book on the experience of severe illness and the process of recovery (Dahlberg & Jaffe, 1977). Dahlberg (1980) wrote an additional article about his clinical experiences with medically ill patients who sought his help after reading his book.
In the last 40 years, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the issue of psychotherapists who have sexual contact with their patients. In 1970, when Dahlberg published his article “Sexual Contact between Patient and Therapist,” it was a pathbreaker. Dahlberg (1970) wrote candidly about the cases that had come to his attention. Although his research was not systematic or controlled, he brought forth data concerning the ages of the people involved, their marital status, and their life situations and motivations: conscious and unconscious. The article appeared the same year that sexologists Masters and Johnson (1970) raised an alarm about sex between therapists and patients, so that professionals in mental health, the law, and the insurance industry began to discuss the issue more openly.
The article which follows originally appeared in 1970 (vol. 6, pp. 107–124) and is reprinted in this issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis,
followed by a contemporary update on the subject by Mark J. Blechner, Ph.D.