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Sexual Feelings in Psychotherapy: Explorations for Therapists and Therapists-In-Training

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Sexual Feelings in Psychotherapy has three parts and a total of 10 chapters. Part One is entitled Fundamentals of Exploration and Discovery. It consists of seven chapters.
Chapter One explains the purpose and plan of the book. One of the issues discussed in this chapter is discomfort with sexual feelings. The authors assert that most therapists experience sexual attraction or arousal to clients, and that this experience makes therapists uncomfortable.
The second chapter explains that "sexual feelings in psychotherapy" is a topic that is largely unaddressed in graduate training programs. In order for training programs to be effective, it is necessary to facilitate an environment that is conducive to learning.
Conditions for learning conditions are elucidated in chapter three. They consist of safety, understanding the task, respect, openness, encouragement, appropriate privacy, acceptance, sensitivity, frankness, and support.
A Self-Assessment consisting of over 75 questions is provided in chapter four. Two examples of questions on the assessment are: 1) "Under what circumstances would you hold a client's hand" (p.50)? And 2) "Under what conditions would you completely disrobe during a session" (p.55)?
In successive chapters, the authors provide insight into common reactions to sexual feelings relative to psychotherapy. Frequent clues to unacknowledged sexual feelings are discussed.
Part Two of the book provides 22 specific passages and 10 scenarios for sexual exploration. The passages were compiled from nearly a century of psychotherapy literature. One passage is entitled, "The Therapist's Attraction Causing Misdiagnosis and Mistreatment: A Passage From David Reiser and Hanna Levenson."
Part Three is entitled "Deciding What To Do." Consultation, among other solutions is suggested in order to confront an impasse.
Reviewer's Critique
The information in the text is presented in a logically progressive manner. It is difficult to decide what information is the least or most practical. Every chapter is beneficial to the reader. Areas of particular interest are the Self-Assessment, Disability Factors in chapter five under the heading of Awareness of Context, and Frequent Clues to Unacknowledged Sexual Feelings in chapter seven.
The authors endeavored to create a literary environment in which therapists and therapists-in-training can explore their sexual feelings. To that extent, they were successful. However, no concrete solutions for decreasing the incidences of sexual exploitation of clients by their therapists on a large scale are offered. The resulting implication is that dealing with sexual feelings in psychotherapy (or not dealing with them) is still essentially a private matter.