Free Delivery Over $100
|
|
|||
|
||||
Overview"For St Augustine, sexual desire was a disease; to the great doctors of coitus today, lack of sexual desire is a disease. For Dr Szasz, both these presumptions are absurd and unscientific. He argues persuasively that human sexuality - however it may be expressed - reveals and reflects who we are and who we want to be. There are no """"sexual disorders"""" that need to be cured by """"sex therapies"""" - there is only the never-ending task of having to develop and shape our lives. Szasz maintains that we evade that task by handing the management of our sexual lives over to sex education and sex therapists." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Thomas SzaszPublisher: Syracuse University Press Imprint: Syracuse University Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 13.30cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 21.00cm Weight: 0.198kg ISBN: 9780815602507ISBN 10: 0815602502 Pages: 224 Publication Date: 30 November 1990 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Awaiting stock  The supplier is currently out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out for you. Table of ContentsReviewsFrom The Myth of Mental Illness nearly two decades ago through Psychiatric Slavery and Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (both 1976), Thomas Szasz has tried to scale the psychiatric giant down to size - not always with authority or reason, but usually with enough passionate conviction to involve. This latest attack on sex therapists and educators - focusing on Masters and Johnson, and Mary Calderone of SIECUS - is another mixed quantity. Szasz traces the evolution of medical thought from the doctrine of masturbatory insanity to what he sees now as the unjustified glorification of masturbation - so much so that Masters and Johnson consider women who do not indulge to orgasm as suffering from masturbatory orgasmic inadequacy. Szasz is pretty convincing in his bid to prove the arbitrariness of medical categories: what once was disease is now treatment, and in some cases vice versa. But he loses in charging that Masters and Johnson's work is not medical or therapeutic but a moral and political enterprise, since his own stance is so patently moralistic: he decries Masters and Johnson as little more than procurers in a prostitution enterprise (in some cases even planning and enabling the consummation of an adulterous relationship ). And he has little more regard for sex education as pioneered by Calderone: he posits an unproven cause-and-effect connection between its onset and an increased rate of illegitimate pregnancy among teenagers. These excesses notwithstanding, Szasz does make you wonder how and why sexual function became primarily a medical issue, particularly since medicine appears to carry its own moral imperatives (which are then passed on to children in the schools with all the authority of mental health pronouncements). Skewed, but an unsettling look into an emotion-laden area. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationTab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
||||
