What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [149]
An easy-to-follow manual for such exposure therapy is H. Moore, Traumatic Incident Reduction: A Cognitive-Emotional Resolution of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Clearwater, Fla., 1991). Patients are cycled repeatedly through a mental viewing of the precipitating incident, until the response becomes “lighter.” Using TIR, Moore reports dramatic improvement in a brief time, but what is needed is a well-controlled outcome test of these procedures.
17. Edna Foa, personal communication, 18 July 1992. Foa is a professor at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychiatry, Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety. Because this is the pioneering center in the treatment of rape, and because so few centers are presently treating rape effectively, I include the center’s phone number: (215) 842–4010.
The study is mentioned in E. Foa and D. Riggs’s comprehensive “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Rape Victims,” American Psychiatric Press Review of Psychiatry 12 (1992): 273–303. See also P. Resick and M. Schnicke, “Cognitive Processing Therapy for Sexual Assault Survivors,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 60 (1992): 748–56.
CHAPTER 11 Sex
1. Sexologists refer to these layers as gender identity, gender role, and the like. I find the word gender in such usage unpalatable. Pronouns, but little else, can be properly said to have gender. This is more than a grammarian’s reservation, however: Gender in place of sex is a desiccating word, a eunuch word. Like the id of Freud’s translators in place of his original das Es, gender dries up the vital fluids that pulsate through erotic life.
John Money, a modern pioneer in research on sexuality, is most responsible for introducing gender to mean more than what pronouns have. Underlying his attempt is the distinction between sex—your genital configuration—and gender—your status as male and female, a much broader idea than what is dictated by your genitals. As laudable as this distinction may be, sexology has become a field with impenetrable jargon (“Let’s do it, let’s fall in limerence”). For a history and apologia for some of this jargon, see J. Money, “The Concept of Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood and Adolescence After 37 Years.” Paper presented at a conference on gender identity and development, St. George’s Hospital, London, March 1992.
2. D. Barlow, G. Abel, and E. Blanchard, “Gender Identity Change in a Transsexual: An Exorcism,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 6 (1977): 387–95.
3. In the only well-documented report of psychotherapy changing sexual identity that I can find, three yeoman behavior therapists attempted very intensive therapy to change, piece by piece, the feminine motor behaviors, role behaviors, masturbation, and fantasies in sequence over the course of many months. Three transsexual men were so treated. In only one of the three cases was clear long-term success obtained. See D. Barlow, G. Abel, and E. Blanchard, “Gender Identity Change in Transsexuals,” Archives of General Psychiatry 36 (1979): 1001–7.
4. B. Kuiper and P. Cohen-Kettenis, “Sex Reassignment Surgery: A Study of 141 Dutch Transsexuals,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 17 (1988): 439–57; M. Ross and J. Need, “Effects of Adequacy of Gender Reassignment on Psychological Adjustment: A Follow-up of Fourteen Male-to-Female Patients,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 18 (1989): 145–53.
5. I want to call the reader’s attention to an alternative theory: R. Pillard and J. Weinrich, “The Periodic Table Model of the Gender Transpositions: Part I. A Theory Based on Masculinization and Defeminization of the Brain,” The Journal of Sex Research 4 (1987): 425–54, is an oddly brilliant attempt to explain the variations in sexual identity and behavior with two simple principles: masculinization and defeminization, both influenced by genes,