Eric Berne - Sex in Human Loving

THIS book is based on the Jake Gimbel Sex Psychology lectures which I was privileged to give at the University of California in April and May of 1966. Dr. Salvatore P. Lucia, Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine at San Francisco Medical Center, was on the selection committee, and I believe it was mainly through his influence that I was chosen for this honor. I am grateful to him and to the other members of the committee for giving me such an opportunity. About 600 people attended and overflowed into the aisles and the back of the auditorium, each from a different background and with a different way of approaching the subject. The original program read as follows:

SEX IN HUMAN LIVING

The above four lectures will be given at 8:30 P.M. in the Medical Sciences Auditorium, San Francisco Medical Center.

The above lecture will be given in the Field House, University of California at Santa Cruz.
All interested persons are cordially invited to attend.

Although all interested persons were invited to attend, the audience consisted mainly of students, faculty, professional people and their co-workers. Dr. Lucia was a most gracious and diplomatic chairman, and my assistant, Miss Pamela Blum, ably assisted in the platform arrangements. Meanwhile, Dr. Lucias secretary, Marjorie Hunt, arranged to preserve the lectures on tape, and Miss Olga Aiello typed them out for me. Without this service, of course, the lectures would have been lost forever, since I had no text and my notes consisted only of topic headings.

But primarily I am grateful to the late Jake Gimbel for making such a series of lectures possible in the first place. When he died in 1943, he left a substantial trust for this purpose, to alternate between Stanford University and the University of California. Since then, the Lectureship has been held by a list of distinguished authorities. They have set a standard which is such a difficult challenge that it has taken me four years to attempt to meet it by placing my thoughts in writing before the public, and it is with some diffidence that I do so even now.

There has been a considerable emergence and spread of sexual knowledge since these lectures were given. In 1967 began the publication of the monthly journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, the most reasonable, reliable, and respectable periodical of its kind. It has much less of the slightly sensational and disapproving attitude of its most illustrious predecessor, the old Zeitschrift fr Sexualwissenschaft wherein the pioneers of psychoanalysis published some of their early papers, and which was a prime source for Havelock Ellis and students of the psychopathology of sex of that era. During the same four-year period, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States emerged into prominence under the leadership of Dr. Mary Calderone, of New York. The impeccable qualifications and manner of Dr. Calderone have undoubtedly contributed to the wide acceptance of her work, particularly in promoting sex education in the schoolroom. A third force in emergent sexual knowledge is the classified advertisement columns of the Berkeley Barb or Tribe and other underground papers, which reveal the prevalence and variety of departures from the official vis--vis position in sexual intercourse much more poignantly than Kinsey and his associates did, although less romantically perhaps than Havelock Ellis writings. A fourth influence which has made itself felt in a significant way during the past two or three years is the legal relaxations: the acceptance of homosexual consent liaisons in England, and of pornography in Denmark, for example. Best of all is the recent conjunction of sex with healthy wit and humor (as opposed to morbid, distasteful, or derogatory jokes), as in the satirical Official Sex Manual, and the sexy picture parodies in Evergreen magazine. The current advanced position is that sex is reasonably decent and is here to stay, so we had best face it. This is in distinction to the rightist position that sex is nastier than anything, and the radical position that nothing is nasty so that sex will not suffer if it is thrown into the pot with violence and garbage.

All of these influences, including the underground papers (which have to be repudiated by everyone else for reasons of respectability), come into fullest flower in the writings of Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who forthrightly enlightens the public in a weekly column under the name of Dr. Hip Pocrates. (He has now retired from this activity.)

The greatest change which has taken place during this period, however, is not an educational one but a practical one. The fuller impact of the pill on American life is marked by the emergence or resurgence of the emancipated woman, with her claim for full sexual equality. The manuscript of this book was combed by several of them for signs of male chauvinism. Some of the examples they found were pretty hairy, so I made appropriate changes in the final draft. In other instances, where I felt female chauvinism was rearing its head, I have stood my ground, and allowed them to have their say in footnotes, where they are represented by the initials EW, with my replies on occasion labeled EB. In fairness to EW, I should say that I have not included their many approving and enthusiastic comments.
What I have done in this book is tell it like I think it is, which entails the use of colloquialisms, imagery, and case reports. Anyone is at liberty to keep it out of the hands of their children under sixteen, or under eighteen, or under twenty-one (or under forty, for that matter), if they feel a need to. I will gladly receive the documentation of anyone who wishes to correct any error I have made in facts. As to matters of opinion, I cannot conscientiously defer to someone else unless he or she has listened to more or to more cogent sexual histories than I have during the past thirty years. I imagine that there are some pimps and prostitutes who know more about sex in general, and some scientists who know more about particular aspects of it, than an experienced and interested psychiatrist does. On the whole, I think that there is as much science as art in what I have put down, and any disputation should be supported by an appropriate body of evidence.

A lot of what is written here was not said in the lectures, or was said in a different way. For one thing, I have learned a lot since 1966, and for another, lecturing is different from writing. Thus it was necessary to edit, change, cut, rearrange, and add to the lectures, to bring them up to date and make them more readable. In order to do this most effectively, I have adopted the device of writing as though I were writing for an audience of one. In other places I have referred to a writer called Cyprian St. Cyr, who is the purported author of a work entitled Letters to My Wifes Maid. These letters are supposed to have been written while St. Cyr was traveling with his wife to faraway places, and are for the purpose of preparing the young lady in question to venture out into the world alone when she leaves her present employment. That is a suitable context for the present work, which is therefore written in the spirit of St. Cyrs Letters, while still endeavoring to maintain the tone of the original lectures as well. In line with this, the previous order of programming, as given above, has been abandoned, along with the original title of the series.*