Volume 19, Number 3 · August 31, 1972
The Fantasy of the Perfect Lover
By Ellen Willis
The Love Treatment: Sexual Intimacy between Patients and Psychotherapists
by Martin Shepard MD
Paperback Library, 222 pp., $1.25
The Radical Therapist
by the Radical Therapist Collective, produced by Jerome Agel
Ballantine, 292 pp., $1.25
I am a sucker for psychology books, so when the paperback edition of The Love Treatment appeared on the rack at Woolworth's, I picked it up and leafed through it. Its premise, I discovered, was that the taboo on sexual intimacy between psychotherapists and their patients should be re-examined, not only because it was being broken all the time anyway but because in the right circumstances such intimacy might have therapeutic value. My immediate hostility to this idea—I'd heard any number of horror stories from friends who had slept with or been propositioned by their therapists—did not keep me from admiring its brilliance. Psychotherapy, as conventionally practiced, had proved a useful tool for exploiting women, and so had the ideology of sexual revolution—why not combine them? It didn't take much imagination—or excessive cynicism—to foresee the practical result of giving (mostly male) therapists a professional rationale for going to bed with their (mostly female) clients. After all, the argument that sex is therapeutic had been a favorite of amateur psychiatrists for years.
Review, 2938 words
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