I have never met a therapist who has decided not to address the issue of sex in therapy, just as I have never met a client who has refused to talk about their intimate life.
However, systemic therapists, particularly Italian ones, do not make sex a structured topic of their clinical reflections.
Curiously, sexology remains a type of therapy parallel to systemic therapy, as if it were unable to provide a serious relational interpretation of sexuality.
For this reason, the title of the book SYSTEMIC SEXUAL THERAPY, in its urgency, refers to the complex work with which Clement Ulrich recovers sexual therapy, organising it within a systemic framework.
Time has passed.
Previously, there was no room for sex in the family therapy of the pioneers.
In the 1950s, talking about sexuality in non-educational terms would have been destabilising.
At the end of the 1960s, the feminist movement and the sexual revolution brought the discourse on sexuality to the fore, which began to shift from the idea of gender equality to the libertarian idea of choosing one’s own sexual life.
Remaining within this description, we can say that, in this case, systemic relational psychology missed the ‘boat’ of sex therapy.
Masters and Johnsons (1966) organised the treatment of sexual disorders within the functionalist paradigm, with a methodology based on experimental observation and symptom treatment.
This is a perspective that is foreign to the systemic world, which in the 1960s vigorously asserted that problems are relational issues and that symptoms exist as acts of communication.
This gave rise to an artificial and paradoxical division:
systemics appropriated only couple therapy, while the functionalist paradigm of sex therapy became a therapy that treated only ‘couple sex’, as if it were possible to treat a couple without treating their sexuality or to treat sex without treating the couple.
The functionalist interpretation has been favoured by the medical-organicist impulse of pharmacological research, which is oriented towards the solution of the symptom, so to speak: this is what matters.
Today, the mechanics of sex have reached an unimaginable degree of precision, with Viagra, vaginal creams and sex education courses, but there is nothing that can treat people‘s dissatisfaction
in people’s sex lives.
The problem that couples bring when they seek sex therapy is mainly related to a decline in desire: technically, they can have sex, but they don’t know if it’s worth it and, above all, they don’t clearly understand their partner’s position in this situation.
This therefore also calls into question one’s own position in the sexual relationship, keeping an eye on the other person’s reaction and shifting the focus to the couple’s dynamics.
At this level, the relational discourse is recovered,
which obviously has always existed, but which today is fundamental to giving meaning to the ideas we construct as systemic therapists.
Texto do livro - TERAPIA SESSUALE SISTEMICA - Ulrich Clement Introdução à edição italiana. Escrito por: Dott.ssa Teresa Arcelloni - Piacenza/Itália Tradução: Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira - BH/Brasil/Italia
CURSO INTERNACIONAL
em 33 vídeo-aulas
TERAPIA DE CASAL & TERAPIA SEXUAL SISTÊMICA
Com as formadoras: Dott.ssa TERESA ARCELLONI e Dott.ssa GLORIA FERRERO