Female Sexual Responsiveness and the Therapist's Feelings

It has been my experience that working through sexual problems with women is generally more difficult than with men. Most men who come to see me and want to work out problems of impotence generally become potent within a year. Women who seek help for inhibited sexual responsiveness frequently require much longer. There are probably many reasons why this should be so, some even more basic than social conditioning. For example, women have a more complex sexual anatomy; this alone must have important psychic consequences in terms of self-experience and self-cognition.

Although it is a truism that the kind of person one is affects the kind of therapy one does, it also appears that where I am as a person and the precise state of my feelings plays a more important role in “sexual cure” with women than with men. No matter how I feel, “on” or “off,” the more pronounced sexual symptoms of male patients tend to clear up relatively quickly. The sexual response of female patients, by contrast, may be more dramatically linked to changes in my own feeling-self and psychic structure. I would like to share a striking example of this that occurred fairly recently.

A little less than a half a year ago while working through a deep level of defenses in my self-analysis, I had a series of dreams, two of which are reported below. Within two weeks of these dreams three very difficult long-term women patients became orgastic during sexual intercourse, something they had previously desired but had been unable to achieve. Two other women had genuinely positive experiences with men, something which until then had been extremely difficult and rare for each of them.

The two core dreams in the sequence, dreamed in one night, are the following: