ABSTRACT
In my practice of sex therapy since 1974, I have observed that almost everyone of the women clients, students, and interviewees with whom I have conversed has described experiencing sex as being more than physicaL perceiving the ups and downs of sexual relationship as possessing spiritual aspects as well as bodily ones. These women range from their teens to their 80s and include heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered women. Women in my clinical practice have been mostly middle-class and Caucasian, but the above observations are confirmed by other women with whom I have been in contact over the years: students, workshop participants, interviewees, and survey respondents from a range of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions. Together, these women represent a variety of sexual dilemmas, ranging from the devastating effects of childhood abuse or negative cultural messages to relationship impasses caused by boredom, affairs, or clueless partners to the social difficulties implicit in exercising sexual options such as celibacy, polyamory, or changed orientation. Their issues have ranged from terror of physical contact to the longing for hot, passionate touch, and from emotional starvation to the craving for intimacy, to know and be known.
