The Treatment of Marital Psycho-sexual Problems

Abstract

Medical practitioners have begun to look for ways of helping the psycho-sexual problems of their patients with increasing awareness that it is impossible to ignore their sexual lives if they are to treat the whole patient. Sexual problems occurring in marriage have been treated in the past in two main ways, by some form of insight therapy or by behaviour therapy, and recently some adherents of both these schools have moved towards treating the disordered relationship rather than the individual patient. Dicks (1967) at the Tavistock Institute has pioneered the treatment of what he calls the ‘diad’ by two therapists, male and female, in a basically analytic framework, whilst Masters and Johnson (1970) in America have used an approach based largely on behaviour therapy techniques, also using two therapists.