• • •
JANICE: I believe I remember the conversation.
He said, “Janice, I think you’re at the stage now where you’re ready to have an orgasm with a man. Not necessarily in intercourse but with a man. If you were married, if you had a lover, I’d suggest that you and he masturbate each other. That you learn this response in a shared situation.”
I said something about not being in an ideal situation, not having anyone like that.
He said, “Well, this is very awkward. I find myself in a difficult position. I would like very much to make love to you. I think it would be very good for you at this stage but I don’t know that I can trust my own motives. You’re very attractive and I feel close to you and sexually drawn to you, and I’m sure that’s at least partially responsible for my wanting to do this.”
I was really astonished. Of course I had had fantasies of lovemaking with Alan. It would have been impossible not to think of it. Not just because of the role he played in my life but because he was literally the man to whom I was closest at this time. It goes without saying that he knew me better than any other man in the world, knew far more about me than my husband had ever known. I also felt that I knew him better than I knew any other man, and was more relaxed with him.
I knew that he was married, and that he loved his wife and got along reasonably well with her. I also knew that he had affairs intermittently and felt that they did not challenge his marriage. It had never occurred to me that he might have had affairs with patients. He never said so.
He went on to tell me that whatever we did would have to be something we could both take casually. That neither of us was in love with the other, although whether we had sex together or not, both of us inevitably felt a good deal of warmth and love for each other.
I don’t know exactly how I felt at the time. Confused, of course. I told him something to the effect that whatever he wanted to do was all right with me, that he was the doctor—I think I did actually use that phrase.
“Let’s just be close,” he said. “Whatever happens will happen.”
He sat next to me and kissed me. It was a very tender moment. I felt a tightness in my chest. He kissed me and began making love to me, undressed me very slowly, petted me, talked very tenderly to me. Then he fingered me very nicely and it felt divine but I was too tense and I couldn’t come.
When the hour was up he had another appointment, but he asked me to come back after work, not as a patient but as a social call. It was not specified that we would have sex, although we both understood that it was implied. He said it would probably be good if we could get to know each other in the context of a relationship beyond that of patient and therapist.
I came back at the appointed time. His receptionist was gone for the day and he met me at the door himself. We had a drink together and made small talk. Then he brought out some marijuana and rolled a few joints. He rolled them very deftly by hand, which impressed me; I have always had to use one of those little cigarette rolling machines.
We smoked, and it was awfully good grass, much more potent than what I was used to. I got nicely stoned and really grooved on the person he was when he wasn’t being a therapist. It’s interesting how your perception of people’s faces changes when you’re stoned. You keep seeing different aspects of their faces, keep seeing ways in which they resemble different people. I was really grooving on him, and he was a very loose and funny person stoned, he has a wild stoned personality and comes up with all sorts of far-out lines.
We were together for quite a while before he started making love to me again, so that when he did I had almost forgotten that that was what we were both there for. I really responded beautifully. I got very excited kissing him, and when he would touch me I would focus my attention on the part of my body he was touching and really tune into the sensations of his touch. I also got into touching him and appreciating his body.
Finally he had me lie down on the couch—the same fucking couch I always sat or sprawled on during our twice-a-week sessions. He made me close my eyes and concentrate on the music that was playing, and he gave me a really professional massage that relaxed my body wonderfully. Then he parted my legs and went down on me.
This is funny: I had never liked this. I never minded going down on a man, I even liked it because of the sense of power it gave me, but I never liked a man to eat me. A man’s mouth on my cunt has always made me freeze up. I never liked just lying there and doing nothing but receive. I think I must have disliked the feeling of being so exposed, so vulnerable. Something like that.
Well, I liked it well enough this time. I felt very safe, very secure. I trusted him in a way that I’m sure I never trusted anybody before.
He ate me for ages, so very, very gently and thoroughly, and a couple of times I felt passion starting to build and I thought about it, and that made me block, but instead of tensing up I stayed relaxed and he kept on eating me. And then it was like the first time I came through masturbation, a deep welling up of feeling before I was even aware of what was happening, and then I knew I was getting there and I didn’t have to try, I didn’t have to do anything, I just had to let go and for once it was easy to let go and I made it.
I stayed there for a couple of hours. He fucked me, once, and although I didn’t come I knew it was only a question of time before I would be able to. He made me come several more times, once more with his mouth and a couple of times with his hands. I think I blew him that time, too, but I can’t remember too clearly.
From that point on, Alan and I had an affair, except I don’t know that that’s the right word for it. We had a sexual relationship, certainly. I kept seeing him twice a week at my usual time, except that instead of sitting there and talking to him I would take off all my clothes and we would fuck for fifty minutes.
He felt that it was improper for him to take money from me at this stage, and I felt it was wrong for him not to. Because it was still very much a therapy situation, and I wanted to be able to feel free to call upon him for advice as a therapist and not to be obligated to him as a lover. We still spent a large portion of each meeting talking, discussing things, aspects of my life and all. I argued that it was not a matter of my paying him anyway, since under the terms of my divorce my former husband would pay my medical expenses, and this qualified as our divorce agreement was drawn, so actually it was my ex-husband paying Alan to fuck me, a situation out of which I drew a certain amount of perverse satisfaction. He finally accepted this.
I continued therapy—and thus continued our “affair”—for another four months. Before very long I was having orgasms all the time with no trouble at all.
I was seeing other men. Alan virtually insisted on this, just as he felt it was important we not see each other except at our scheduled times. I had sex with other men and found that my frigidity seemed to be cured. I could come with men besides Alan; I found that I could come with a man if I wanted to, and I also found that I did not invariably want to. I had to care for a man to a certain extent in order to want to have an orgasm with him.
I’m fairly confident that the therapy program he designed for me would have worked out satisfactorily if he and I had not had sexual relations together. There’s no question in my mind, though, that this accelerated things for me. Given my whole sexual and emotional state, he was precisely the man with whom I was most likely to be able to open up and relax, the man most likely to be able to bring me to orgasm. So it certainly saved a lot of time and frustration for him to make love to me.
I think it also made it easier for me to open up to him more completely as a patient to a therapist, and vice-versa. Because there was always this current of sexual attraction existing between us, although we had both repressed it to the point where I at least was unaware of it, unaware of the extent of my own desires and completely unaware that Alan entertained such desires. I would think that kind of undercurrent is present in most psychotherapeutic situations involving a male therapist and a femal
e patient, assuming that neither of them specifically turns the other one off.
And I would think that undercurrent gets in the way. You feel it even if you don’t know you’re feeling it. Once we had become lovers, we weren’t repressing all of this, that bar to intimacy had been crossed by the fact of our physical intimacy, and I think it helped to make him a more effective therapist and to make me a more reachable patient.
It ended with no bad feelings on either side. We had reached a point where we both knew I had no real further need for therapy, I was functioning successfully both sexually and generally. Also, I was having an affair with a man with a certain amount of emotional involvement, and while I didn’t feel I was cheating on this man by having sex with Alan, I didn’t feel entirely right about it, either. So we agreed that I had completed therapy, and that was the end of it. I have nothing but good feelings for Alan.
I’m sure a lot of women are sexually exploited by therapists. There’s nothing easier than for a therapist to seduce a patient. I certainly don’t feel that I was exploited, not in the slightest. I also recognize that Alan did get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of having sex with me, but I hardly resent that; it would be far more depressing to think that it wasn’t pleasurable for him!
A girlfriend of mine has problems, and hasn’t been getting anywhere in therapy, and recently we were talking and she confided that her problem is inadequate sexual response, which I gather means she’s frigid to one extent or another. I told her I had had very much the same problem for years and years, and that I had gone to one particular therapist and everything had worked out. I gave her Alan’s name and number and she said she might call him and start therapy with him.
I was dying to tell her just what form his therapy had eventually taken, but of course I couldn’t. For one thing, I’m sure I would have felt very differently throughout the beginning stages of therapy if I had known that things would ultimately resolve themselves as they did. Also, suppose he isn’t attracted to her and they don’t wind up fucking—I would think it would be devastating to her ego!
• • •
JWW: Bennett is a psychiatrist whose practice seems to run heavily to persons with sexual problems of one sort or another. He employs a variety of therapeutic techniques, including hypnotherapy, a modification of the Masters and Johnson program for couples, sexual surrogates for sexually inadequate males, etc. I talked with him at some length on several occasions concerning his views on sexual therapy and the success and failure of various courses of treatment he had employed.
On a couple of occasions he had remarked on the difficulty of employing sexual surrogates for frigid women as one could employ them for sexually inadequate men. He made the point that any well-trained and emotionally suitable woman could function admirably as a sexual surrogate for a male partner, but that an adaptation of that program for a female patient was unfeasible on both physical and emotional grounds. In the first place, he pointed out, women were not geared to accept casual, unemotional sex to the extent that men were, and those women most apt to be frigid were precisely those women least likely to respond to the services of a surrogate partner. Furthermore, the physical requirements of male response were such that a male surrogate would have to find a woman attractive and desirable in order to have sex with her; one could not simply will an erection into existence. A female is capable of feigning both excitement and climax; a male lacks this capability.
Perhaps I sensed what he was trying to tell me. In any event, I said something to the effect that he must have been occasionally tempted to function in the surrogate capacity himself.
“Tempted?” He considered this. “Oh, yes, the temptation is often present. When you know just what it is that a woman needs, and feel you can supply it as well as anyone, perhaps better than anyone else available to her, and when you know that you yourself would find the whole experience damned enjoyable—” He looked at me. “I’ve done it a couple of times,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s wise to tell you this. It probably isn’t.”
I made noises about my being a model of discretion.
“I would certainly hope so,” he said. “Well, I seem to want to talk about it, don’t I? It’s not something I make a habit of. It’s happened a couple of times.” He never did supply an exact figure. “And I don’t honestly know how I feel about it. I’ve always had a good deal of contempt for my colleagues in the profession who make the seduction of their more attractive female patients something of a habit. I’ve always felt the pressures—everybody feels the pressures—it’s there and it’s so easy to get and being a shrink doesn’t make you less a man. I had always felt the pressures and had never had much trouble resisting them. One simply forced oneself to pass up this particular forbidden fruit and that was all there was to it.
“In these particular cases, though, the circumstances were special. Sometimes I feel my actions were unethical and immoral and that I was acting out of my own selfish sexual desires. Other times I think that what I did was very much a matter of matching treatment to illness, that it would have been a violation of my oath as a physician had I not had sexual relations with these patients. And I could easily supply an unconscious motivation for either of these lines of thought, believe me.
“Well, I might as well get down to cases. Do be discreet, won’t you? Not merely for the sake of my professional standing, but there’s also the little fact that I’m married, and my wife would not be terribly happy about all of this.”
I have been discreet, as is my vaunted custom. Bennett is not Bennett’s name, needless to say, nor are any of the circumstances of what follows a precise duplication of actuality. But here, in essence, is what he told me.
• • •
BENNETT: The first patient with whom I was intimate was a girl of twenty-two. She was completely frigid, incapable of any erotic response whatsoever. She had had intercourse with men half a dozen times. She also seems to have been raped at age eight or thereabouts, but I was never entirely certain whether this in fact occurred or whether it was some form of false memory, as her recollection of the event varied from time to time. The nature of her psychosexual development was certainly consistent with such an experience, but that sort of consistency often is seen in cases where the incident has turned out to be false memory or fantasy.
In addition to her attempts at having sex with men, she had also twice had lesbian relations. She was no more capable of response with female partners. Her attempts at homosexuality were deliberate, deriving not from specific desire but out of the suspicion that, since she could not enjoy heterosexuality, she must be a lesbian at heart. The lack of enjoyment, plus the feeling after the fact that homosexual relations were unnatural and immoral, led her to abandon this approach.
When I first saw her, she was extremely shy and withdrawn. She had by then completed college and was employed as a research assistant in some sort of foundation-assisted project. She had had no active sex life in the preceding year and a half. Indeed, her social life was limited to her acquaintances at work, all of whom were considerably older than she was and with none of whom she had contact away from the office. She lived alone in a small furnished apartment, spent her spare time reading and going to movies by herself, and finally entered therapy because of an extreme increase in anxiety. She had always had acrophobia, for example, a fear of heights which is extremely common, but it was rapidly reaching dire proportions. She had moved from her second-floor apartment to a ground-floor apartment because it bothered her to be that far off the ground. She worried that she was losing her mind, that people could tell by looking at her that she was emotionally disturbed, etc.
From the beginning, she responded well to therapy. Here was a perfect example of a person suffering from terminal loneliness. She had absolutely no one to talk to. I sometimes think that therapy is useful in a great many instances, despite the fact that the therapist has no idea what’s wrong with the patient or what on earth to do about it, simply because the
patient profits from having someone to talk to. To an extent, it doesn’t matter what the patient says or if the therapist says anything in reply. The therapist doesn’t even have to listen—and all of us, incidentally, have times when we just can’t listen, no matter how conscientious we try to be. For some patients, none of this matters. All they really require, or at least a good portion of what they require, is a person to whom they can say whatever they want.
I was seeing this girl once a week. We got along well, we seemed to strike the right kind of sparks from each other. This isn’t a requisite for successful therapy but it’s often helpful, and it certainly makes the time more pleasant from the therapist’s point of view. Together we did a certain amount to exorcise the demon of rape—again, whether it happened or not—and we worked to shape up her ideas about sex and about herself as a sexual being. She was a good hypnosis subject. I didn’t put her under very deeply, I hardly ever use deep hypnosis, but I employed suggestion and also taught her how to use auto-suggestion on her own. This proved to be of value to her when she masturbated, which she did quite successfully. She had attempted masturbation in the past but was repressed to the point where she could not even excite herself. I had her use a vibrator, which does simplify things, and I had her build fantasies and develop them through auto-suggestion, and before very long she was having nice little orgasms all over the place.
Well, this was good. The simple fact that she was able to get her rocks off once a day had a definite therapeutic effect. It’s simple fact that human beings feel better if they’re getting off regularly. It’s best if this happens with someone you love, but an orgasm is an orgasm whether the device inducing it is a handy-dandy personal vibrator or King Kong’s cock.
The Sex Therapists: What They Can Do and How They Do It (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 15) Page 10