Moving Instructions: A History of Sex Therapy, 1954-2001

This thesis examines the sudden emergence and surprising disappearance of “sex therapy” as a distinctive intervention in the United States during the second half of twentieth century. Sex therapy is a psychologized and behavioural therapeutic intervention aimed at solving clients’ dissatisfactions with their sexual experiences. I argue that sex therapy appeared in the 1950s and 1960s out of marital therapy and the American medicalization of sex. The field experienced a quick spurt in popularity in the 1970s, and an equally rapid decline during the Reagan administration and AIDS crisis in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, its practices had largely migrated into and were usurped by couples therapy and bio-medicine. Despite this short existence as a public-facing intervention, I argue that sex therapists’ conceptions of what sex was, and what it meant to be a sexual being, were reproduced in lay Americans’ self-knowledges in the creation of a sexual subject.