Some Linguistic Considerations Related to the Issue of Female Orgasm

“If you want to know more about femininity,” advised Freud in 1933, “inquire from your own experiences of life or turn to the poets, or else wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.”7 Today, forty-odd years later, we no longer need turn to the poets, for science has begun to give us the “deeper and more coherent information” that Freud clearly recognized was lacking in his time.

The widespread dissemination of Masters and Johnson's pioneering work,16,17 combined with the impact of the women's movement, has created a climate in which women of most socioeconomic classes are looking into their own experience to understand their sexual functioning. We see changes every day in our practices that reflect the effects of the so-called sexual revolution—changes consistent with the dramatic ones that have occurred throughout our society generally. Yet several issues related to the female orgasam emain curiously resistant to change. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the psychosocial sources that nourish confusion in the minds of our patients and to make a specific technical recommendation.

In spite of the information explosion about female sexual functioning generally, few specific technical suggestions have appeared in the literature so far.1,2,15 Although the women's movement has stimulated a considerable amount of discussion, most writers have addressed themselves to extremely broad psychosocial topics.9,10,27,28 Even the recognition that recent psychosexual trends have implications for the future practice of psychotherapy has produced a somewhat general approach.3,12,18,19,20,30,32

Since technical recommendations should emerge from theoretical revisions, a consideration of reformulations that have been