ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter summarises the key points of the author’s proposal that sensate focus be integrated in couple psychotherapy and vice versa. It reprises how the professional bifurcation in treatments persists, with lacunae in each approach. Relationship problems are embodied and expressed through sexual disorders and symptoms which sex therapy treats largely but not entirely in a cognitive-behavioural way. Interpreting sexual response primarily in a behavioural way fails to address the embodiment of couples’ unconscious primitive anxieties, their projective identification and the total transference situation of clinical work. A psychoanalytic perspective omits sexual behaviour and raises the phenomenon of splitting, which might have its roots in early sensual experiences that remain unintegrated in the psyche. Integrating aggression into relationships with others who are also the object of desire is a particular challenge. A re-thinking of sensate focus using Winnicottian theories is proposed as a bridge between the two camps and a move away from dualism towards integration in the profession.
