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Psychoanalytic and experiential theoretical models and clinical techniques are usually regarded in adversary terms by clinicians who practice either discipline. Recent experience with sex therapy which employs both modalities has yielded an opposite view. The rational combination of behavioral and psychodynamic modes can produce a fascinating synergism which has great therapeutic potential.
Dynamically orientated sex therapy provides the opportunity to observe and to utilize the fascinating interplay between the prescribed behavioral experiences and the patient's psychic organization. For the structured experiences are not merely mechanical anxiety reducing devices. On the contrary, they can have profound emotional meaning which may touch on the deepest unconscious conflicts and can evoke the patient's entire armamentarium of defenses and resistances.
Perhaps a brief description of the tasks employed in sex therapy, and the rationale upon which these are based will help clarify this concept.
Examination of the histories of sexually dysfunctional patients frequently reveals that their psychosexual development was arrested at various levels.* Some patients are devoid of sensual and sexual feelings since early childhood, others successfully master the masturbatory stage, some can respond erotically to precoital sexual stimulation but are blocked at intercourse, some have reached the stage of intercourse, but only in immature, impersonal situations. It may be speculated that these fixations result from anxiety which produces conflict about sexual pleasure at various developmental levels. The sexually dysfunctional patient defends against such anxiety by avoidance of erotic experience and by inhibition of functioning.
In sex therapy, in contrast with psychoanalytic therapy, one