Couples in idealizing and idealized transferences will find this game more natural. When the idealizing partner plays the slave and the idealized partner the master, they will feel a bit embarrassed since it hits so close to the truth of their situation. However, when they reverse roles, both may have an even harder time playing [...]

The shocked but delighted husband will probably pay the $200 without a hitch. If he isn’t in on the game, he may even be flabbergasted and mutter something like “What about your headache?” or “What’s come over you?” Or he may bicker about paying for his wife’s sexual favors. If he bickers too much, the [...]

Players: Depressed husband and depressed wife. Activists: Both husband and wife, by turns. Setting: Home.

Aim: To relax body and mind, assuage depression, and release sexual and creative energy.

Game Plan: Husband and wife begin by playing poker, which quickly becomes strip poker: Each time one of them loses, he or she has to take off an [...]

This man could not grasp for a moment that he had an unconscious need to infuriate his wife, so as to feel right and superior—since she was always the person who was “losing her cool.” He had developed this way of defending in connection with an obsessive-compulsive mother, who had wanted to organize and control [...]

Most therapists will tell you that the prettiest patients can (and sometimes do) develop erotic transferences toward the ugliest therapists. It so happens that sexual attraction, at its deepest level, does not depend on physical appearance—which only serves as an initial spur. At bottom, sexuality depends on one’s capacity to give and receive gratitude and [...]

Socarides notes that there are two important criteria for selecting homosexual patients for psychoanalysis: (1) the availability of guilt feelings for unconscious wishes underlying the homosexual impulses is an important index of the patient’s capacity for therapeutic change. If such guilt is not conscious, this does not necessarily mean that the patient is not suffering [...]

Transsexual, the adjective, means simply going from one sex to the other. Thus one could have a casual transsexual thought or dream, one’s hermaphroditic baby could have a transsexual change of the birth announcement or as a hermaphrodite, and one could undergo a transsexual reassignment of one’s sex. A person of non-hermaphroditic, non-ambiguous genital anatomy [...]

The application of law to sexual activity is at least as old as the codes of Hammurabi and the Judeo-Christian Bible. Certainly the latter crucially informed moralities behind the constitution of English law. In the Old Testament, rules pertaining to sexual behavior were part of a wider comprehension of ritual purity and sacred wholeness which [...]

Galenson and Roiphe suggested that one can differentiate between two types of auto-erotic activities during the early childhood period. One is autoerotic activity proper, which does not include masturbatory fantasy and is objectless. These autoerotic activities belong to the early months of development, in which the process of separation-individuation (Mahler and others) is not complete [...]

Extramarital sexual relations, sexual inter course of a married person with someone other than the spouse, have been considered sinful criminal, and immoral throughout the history of Western society. Theologians of all times and creeds have treated adultery as a heinous act, and as late as the seventeenth century the penalty for adultery in most [...]