Directiveness in psychotherapy and the "sexual revolution"

The "sexual revolution" has produced both tangible gains and new contexts in which susceptible people can get into trouble. Increasing separation of "sexuality" from reproduction is a gain. Psychotherapy itself can profit, both by the need to deal with new problems and by the opportunity which new social behaviors afford for rethinking theory on a basis of observation. We are no longer likely to be overzealous in categorizing sexual deviance. The potential separation of sex from parenthood makes possible a better-aimed directive psychotherapy. The fact that we no longer moralize irrationally about sexual preferences makes us free to moralize rationally about parenting and about responsible behavior--the area which an antidote to "anything goes" is most evidentially defensible on psychiatric grounds.