"Chapter 02 : A Focus on Sex Therapy" by Leslie Schover PhD and Tacey A. Rosolowski PhD
 
Chapter 02 : A Focus on Sex Therapy

Chapter 02 : A Focus on Sex Therapy

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Description

In this chapter, Dr. Schover explains how she shifted her focus to sex therapy, an evolving field in the seventies when she entered graduate school at UCLA (MA in psychology in 1975; PhD in clinical psychology, 1979). She explains that part of her interest arose from the fact that she was sexually harassed by her honor’s thesis advisor at Brown University, an experience that raised her awareness of gender roles and created an interest in addressing them. She also notes that more and more researchers were focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. She describes her working relationship with Ken Pope, PhD. She also talks about her own research into the reaction of psychotherapists when patients would raise issues of sexuality during sessions.

Next, Dr. Schover talks about her postdoctoral fellowship in the department of Psychology (Clinical) Sex Therapy and Research at the State University of New York, Stony Brook (7/1979-2/1981). She describes the atmosphere in this department, which she describes as the “Camelot of sex therapy,” and where she had real mentors for the first time.

Identifier

SchoverL_01_20180918_C02

Publication Date

9-18-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; The Researcher; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Professional Path; Evolution of Career; Formative Experiences; Women and Minorities at Work; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; Cultural/Social Influences; Mentoring; On Mentoring

Transcript

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So tell me about focusing your interests into the area of sexuality.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

So, I think the second year we were there, we had practicum training, and one of the courses I took was a sex therapy, Masters and Johnson, couples sex therapy. And it was all academic year, and even though I was paired with someone as my co-therapist that I didn’t like very much, it was very interesting to me. I think at that age, I thought it was kind of cool. I thought oh, you can solve sexual problems and make a big difference in somebody’s relationship. I thought it was a lot easier than it really is. I think I also felt like I was cool because I was going to be this expert in sexuality and all those kinds of things. So, it appealed to my little rebellious streak. I always did the right thing, but I had this little rebellious streak underneath, dating the wrong people or having the wrong friends or kind of acting out a little bit, but not in a way that was terribly noted. So.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So tell me about the next step with your focus on that.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

So, when it came time to pick a dissertation, I had been involved in some very early studies on sexual harassment and psychology training, and I had gotten into that partly by accident, because I met a psychologist, Ken Pope, who did a lot with psychology and ethics, and the idea for that survey study was partly his. I think [I] did something a little earlier than that [a paper for a course], but I don’t remember now, exactly what it was. But that study got a lot of press and it got published in a very high impact journal. I had been sexually harassed in a somewhat mild way, by my honors thesis advisor at Brown, who ended up kind of compelling me to index two of his books by hand, with index cards, which was very tedious, and then he wanted me to buy the books, so he could autograph them, which I didn’t do. Everybody knew you needed his recommendation to get into graduate school, and so I didn’t feel like I could do very much except evade his little, you know putting his hand over my hand on the doorknob and inviting me to go to Florida with him, and things like that. I mean it wasn’t as bad as some sexual harassment for sure, but he kept trying.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

It’s one of those ‘creating the environment’ kind of things.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah, and it was very creepy, he was a creepy little man.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

How was working with Ken Pope? What did you learn with that working relationship?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, I think some research methodology and I’m sure that he probably supervised me in writing the paper. He’s someone I respect a lot and always liked. We were never real close friends or social buddies, but he was very aware of, I think, being a more senior psychologist. He already was out of graduate school for several years and he didn’t want our relationship to be in any way crossing any boundaries and you know that was fine. So.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

This was very early work on the whole boundary violations thing and kind of ethical practices, as women are entering the field more, I mean all that kind of stuff.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah, and I was really conscious of gender roles and it was—there was a lot of work on gender roles and gender power issues in psychology at that time and when I chose my dissertation topic, I kind of made it up myself, rather than having a mentor who had a bigger project that I, you know, would latch onto part of. And what I wanted to look at was how a psychotherapist would react if a patient brought up sexual topics, and I contrasted two types of topics; one, with the patient just disclosing something about their sex life and two, the patient trying to be seductive towards the psychologists and how would you respond in a helpful way to that. And now that I think about it, I’m sure another influence on that was my year of practicum training at the VA Hospital, where I was in a spinal cord injury ward and some of the patients were really --talk about sexual harassment. I mean they were really, really aggressive verbally, and never to me physically but to other [psychology interns] sometimes. I mean, they would back [one woman up against the wall with their wheelchairs.] We had an intern who was not from UCLA , but from one of the professional schools of psychology, and she was dating our supervisor and everybody knew it, and she would come into the unit, the Spinal Cord Injury Unit, and the guys would go—and she was kind of buxom and blonde, and they would go, “Here comes the moo cow,” and they were really awful. So, I was very—I was so angry at being on the receiving end of any of that and I didn’t know how to handle it. I think that was another thing that made me interested in that topic, because I wanted to figure out if things like this happened, what do you do to maintain your sense of power and balance in the relationship so that you can still be helpful to somebody.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And dignity too, I mean not being eroded by that. Anything else you wanted to say about the graduate program, in terms of you know kind of how your thinking evolved and how you were beginning to conceptualize your next steps. I mean here you are, immersed in all this gender stuff.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Yeah. Well, I decided I wanted to do a postdoctoral fellowship, and that my first choice would be to do one that focused on sex therapy and sexuality. So, I applied to a couple places, but by far my first choice was Stony Brook [State University of New York] where there was, at that time, a group of researchers and clinicians who were supported with big NIH grants. They had kind of a little Camelot of sexuality research. So, my eventual mentor, Joe LoPiccolo, had written several textbooks on sex therapy and done outcomes research on the effectiveness of sex therapy, taking kind of the very medicalized stuff that Masters and Johnson had done, in adding some real psychotherapy outcome research for it. Julia Heiman, who I also worked with, was doing physiological studies on female sexual function, as well as interested in the sex therapy outcome research, and then there was a whole group there who were doing things with gender identity and transgender, and children with different gender identities early on. So, we all interacted with each other, you know there was probably a group of about 20 people, including the faculty and the postdocs and graduate students.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So how did all that happen at Stony Brook, you know how did all these people come together there?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

They must have written some of those grants together and then gotten them funded, I think, I’m not sure if they brought the grant with them or got there and wrote the grant, but by the time I was there. [ ] By the time I was there, you know they had the grants pretty much funded. I was there for a little less than two years and I think within a year or two after that, everybody drifted apart, the grants ended and they went to different places. So.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Right, right. So what were the years that you were there?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Nineteen seventy-nine to ’81.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay. All right. So, good experience. How do you feel you grew during that time?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, it was the first time I really had mentors who introduced me to prominent people in the field and made me feel like I could grow into having faculty positions and being a prominent researcher myself, if I wanted to do the work and do that. They were there looking out for me, and that kind of mentorship and apprenticeship that not everybody gets. I certainly didn’t have it in graduate school. I was kind of a loose cannon that nobody cared about all that much, you know. In fact, I have a friend who became an expert in pain, at the University of Washington, and probably the two of us have published more than most of the other original 15 people in our class and neither of us were considered the ones most likely to succeed. So sometimes we have laughed about that over the years, that the people they thought were going to be these very prominent researchers, went into private practice or went to medical school, and they didn’t even bother with us.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And mentoring can make a huge difference, really a huge difference.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Also, I think it really depends on whether you have that fire in your belly, that you want to work hard enough and go through the nastiness.

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Chapter 02 : A Focus on Sex Therapy

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