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

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorPettit, Michael
dc.contributor.authorSmolyanitsky, Hanna Lea Rebecca
dc.date.accessioned2023-12-08T14:35:22Z
dc.date.available2023-12-08T14:35:22Z
dc.date.issued2023-12-08
dc.date.updated2023-12-08T14:35:22Z
dc.degree.disciplinePsychology (Functional Area: History and Theory)
dc.degree.levelMaster's
dc.degree.nameMA - Master of Arts
dc.description.abstractThis 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.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/41688
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectPsychology
dc.subject.keywordsSex therapy
dc.subject.keywordsHistory of sexuality
dc.subject.keywordsHistory of psychotherapy
dc.titleMoving Instructions: A History of Sex Therapy, 1954-2001
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Smolyanitsky_Hanna_LR_2023_Masters.pdf
Size:
741.43 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.87 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
YorkU_ETDlicense.txt
Size:
3.39 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download

Collections

Psychology (Functional Area: History and Theory)

All items in the YorkSpace institutional repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved except where explicitly noted.