Chapter 1.  Sex!  Now That You’re Paying Attention…  If you are going to talk about psychology, there is a rule (maybe an unwritten one) that you have to start right off talking about sex.  Partly, this is because many people think that that’s all psychotherapists think about.  And maybe some do.  Partly, this common misconception comes about because many people don’t know that psychology has advanced a long way past Freud’s (a dirty old man who fathered psychotherapy) pre-scientific grasp of what people are about.  Partly, the notions about sex in life come from other dirty old and young men and women who haven’t discovered that life holds out any other kinds of fun.  Partly, the idea about the importance of sex comes from everybody’s vicarious pleasure from talking and thinking about it.  In any case, one just has to start off by talking about sex, if only to get people’s attention.

But what is there to say about sex which is not just the same old stuff that people have been talking about for centuries, and which psychotherapists have been getting other people to talk about for decades?  You might think that everything interesting about it has already been said.  So we might have to get our vicarious oral gratifications from chewing over stuff that other people have talked about at some length.  Let’s see.