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For a number of years I have investigated sexual intimacy both from the point of view of a social anthropologist (1971), and from the point of view of a psychoanalytically oriented therapist (1973). The literature dealing with the physiology of sexual intimacy is voluminous, and surveys such as Kinsey (1948, 1953) and Sorenson (1973) offer general guide lines. But the psychic evolution of this particular aspect of the life cycle has not been scrutinized as much as it might have been, from a comparative point of view.
It has been remarked that psychology is a field that has a long past and a short history. Thus, from the famous speech of Nestor in the Iliad, through contemporary times, soliliquies have been spoken on the stages of man. Examples can be found in the mythology of all cultures depicting the human career from helplessness to helplessness. It is the intent of this article to address some attempts that have been made by psychology as a discipline, particularly clinical psychology, to organize the data of the human life cycle. It is not proposed in this article to make an exhaustive comparison of the work of Piaget, Kohlberg, Levinson, and Vaillant, for example, but rather to investigate two attempts to deal with a critical part of the life cycle, namely the development of emotional