ABSTRACT
In this lecture, related to the preceding "Masculinity and Femininity Reconsidered" (1965), Greenson specifically discussed the problems of married men in their forties showing a decline in their sexual desires and suffering from clinical frigidity. Often the psychoanalyst encounters wives who are sexually dissatisfied with such husbands. The symptoms reported to Greenson included the men having less emotional interest in their wives, manifested by the absence of normal intercourse, increases in masturbation and pollution dreams, and wishes to watch scenes of sexual activity in pornography or to be the passive individual in an actual menage-á-trois. In tracing these fears of emotional involvement (one of his great interests, as we saw in earlier lectures), he pointed to a reemergence in adult life of concerns relating to the oedipal complex. He described to the audience that one of the reasons middle-aged men want to get rid of their middle-aged wives and find younger women is that they cannot stand having intercourse with women old enough to be like their mothers were. Conversely, women, according to Greenson, "seem to have less aversion to Pop as a sexual guy."
