ABSTRACT
The study of sexual behaviour in humans differs from many other fields of psychological endeavour in that although a certain amount of information may be gleaned by direct experimentation, a great deal more data derives from clinical experience, from anecdote and case history and, thanks to today’s comparative freedom of communication, from direct interview with those who need neither the clinician’s modifications nor the psychoanalyst’s couch. It would also seem that nowadays we are to some extent allowed to formulate some of our theories of sexuality on the basis of analogy from other areas of work: no psychologist has ever taken a group of male infants and systematically conditioned them into a later fetishistic obsession for gymslips or stiletto heels, even if Rachman and Hodgson’s (1968) classic experimental induction in adult males of sexual arousal at the sight of a woman’s high-heeled boot produced at least some temporary effect. Most of us thus seem content to accept, for instance, that the sexual pattern we acquire is at least partly the result of childhood conditioning, simply because we are pretty certain that people can be conditioned under the right circumstances.
