Behavior: Repairing the Conjugal Bed

• Share

HARRY MILLER is not his true name, but his problem is genuine enough. He is a failure in bed. Years have passed since Harry and his wife, who are in their late 30s? have given or taken any pleasure in sex. With considerable hesitation and embarrassment, they confided their difficulty to their minister, who was sympathetic but unable to help. He referred them to the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis. On arrival, the Millers checked into a red brick residential building where the foundation leases apartments at $100 a week for out-of-town patients. At 9 the next morning, they called for their first appointment.

Before long, the sexual anxieties and fears that had brought the Millers to St. Louis began to dissolve. The foundation, which is discreetly identified as the Central Medical Building, could pass for an ordinary medical clinic anywhere. Inside, piped music vies softly with a professional and somehow reassuring hush. A woman attendant, dressed in the white pantsuit and beige silk scarf that is the uniform for the foundation's female staff, directed them to the second floor.

Ultimate Communication

There they met Dr. William Howell Masters, the director, an owlish, stern-looking man of 54, and Mrs. Virginia Johnson, 45, his research associate, whose manner is as outgoing as Masters' is reserved. The Millers were told that this first interview, and all others, would be taped—a measure designed to protect the patients by eliminating stenographers from the necessary history-taking. They were reminded of the foundation's credo as worded by Masters: "There is no such thing as an uninvolved partner in a sexually distressed marriage." Indeed, had the Millers not entered treatment together, they could not have entered at all. Finally, they were asked to refrain from any sexual activity whatsoever until otherwise directed.

The message, in short, was that the Millers were not there to perform or be judged. They were there to rediscover, under guidance but not observation, the ultimate form of human communication that takes place in the marriage bed.

The Millers are a hypothetical though representative example of the 790 cases of sexual incompatibility that have been treated in St. Louis over the past eleven years. In a new book called Human Sexual Inadequacy (Little, Brown; $12.50), Dr. Masters and Mrs. Johnson summarize their therapeutic approach to the problem of what they call sexual "dysfunction." Written in less than six weeks, the book is poorly organized and clotted with a jargon that makes it almost unreadable for all but the doctors, psychologists, marriage counselors and other professionals for whom it was intended. Nonetheless, the work is already a bestseller, and with some reason. In the underdeveloped field of sex research, the authors are pioneers; they are the most important explorers since Alfred Kinsey into the most mysterious, misunderstood and rewarding of human functions.

Masters and Johnson take a modest view of their work. "We do not pretend expertise in anything," says Masters. "Ours is a small, somewhat determined research effort—the first study of the physiology, and to a major degree the psychology, of sexual function. Many people will be in the field in due course and will do a better job."