Concurrent sex therapy and psychoanalytic psychotherapy by separate therapists: effectiveness and implications

Since the publication of Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Inadequacy in 1970, sex therapy has become an established, though controversial, new approach to the treatment of sexual disorders. Masters and Johnson adopted the position that any other form of psychotherapy should be avoided or suspended during the two- or three-week period of sex therapy. Helen Kaplan, in considering sex therapy to be a type of psychotherapy, has stressed that the skillful trained psychotherapist uses his awareness of the psychodynamics and unconscious conflicts of the couple in modifying and tailoring the sex therapy program to their individual needs. In the present study, sex therapy, utilizing a second therapist, was introduced into an ongoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy.