Abstract
Sex therapy, as we know it today, is a relatively new therapeutic approach within the history of psychology, psychiatry, and related disciplines. The earliest appearance of problem-focused techniques for sexual disorders occurred in the late 1950s, with Wolpe’s successful application of classical conditioning procedures to anxiety-based sexual dysfunction (Wolpe, 1958) and Semans’ 1956 article describing the “stop-start” method for premature ejaculation. Since this time, a number of approaches to time-limited sex therapy have been developed, in particular Masters and Johnson’s (1970) conjoint sex therapy, Kaplan’s (1974) integration of analytic and behavioral approaches, Lazarus’ (1971) multimodal behavior therapy, and LoPiccolo’s (1978) direct treatment of low sexual arousal. Each of these therapeutic models shares the basic assumption that sexual behavior can be treated directly, without long-term exploration of underlying psychological dynamics, and in most cases, utilizes skill acquisition and anxiety reduction techniques to accomplish this goal.
If your life at night is good, you think you have Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, You will consider your best and truest interests Most hateful
—Euripides, Medea
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Beck, J.G. (1990). Brief Psychotherapy for the Sexual Dysfunctions. In: Wells, R.A., Giannetti, V.J. (eds) Handbook of the Brief Psychotherapies. Applied Clinical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2127-7_19
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