(1987) The Celestial Bed (3 page)

‘At this time I am going to brief you on the training period that lies ahead of you, so that you know what to expect. This will be a monologue. I will speak without pause. If you have questions, save them for when I have finished. Also, of course, I will shorthand the whole procedure, so to speak - just give you the highlights, since all of it will develop fully in your training period. Further, do not be concerned about any questions you failed to ask me today. You can ask them as we work from tomorrow on.

‘Oh, yes - ’

He focused on Paul Brandon.

‘ — Mr Brandon, since most of the patients we’ll be dealing with in therapy will be males, I will address myself to the activities of our female surrogates who will work with them. However, almost all the procedures I discuss will apply to you, too, as a male surrogate working with female patients. Where there are exceptions in your treatments, well, we can take these up privately later when you are assigned to female patients seeking help.’

Digging into his pocket for his box of cigarillos, Freeberg said, ‘I have no objections to any of you smoking, if those around you do not mind, or even chewing gum or mints.’ Lighting his cigarillo, he saw Brandon pull an old briar pipe and pouch from his jacket pocket, while Lila Van Patten removed a packet of cigarettes from her bag.

‘Let’s begin with the basics,’ Freeberg continued. ‘Why were you selected to serve as partner, or sex surrogates? I selected you not because of your good looks, or physiques, or what I deemed to be your sex appeal. I selected you for more important overall qualities — because I saw in each of you the qualities of knowledge, compassion, warmth, and real concern for others not as healthy as yourselves. You all have in common an appreciation of giving, receiving, touching, and caring, and a desire to share what you have to offer.

‘Let’s begin with Masters and Johnson, the real pioneers in the use of sex surrogates. William Masters came from Ohio, studied medicine at the University of Rochester, and eventually began a research programme in sexual functioning at Washington University school of medicine. Two years later, realising that he needed a female associate, Masters hired Virginia Johnson. She was a Missouri farm girl, a divorcee and mother, who had taken some courses in psychology but had no college degree. They made a perfect investigative team, and as you undoubtedly know, they eventually married each other.

‘As Masters and Johnson quickly learned, insight or talk therapy - free association, questions and answers - did not provide enough help for their more desperate patients. What their male patients needed, Masters and Johnson saw, was “someone to hold on to, talk to, work with, learn from, be a part of, and above all else, give to and get from during the sexually dysfunctional male’s acute phase of therapy”. I suppose that was how the idea of the sex surrogate was born in 1957. There were men with grave sexual problems who did not have cooperative female partners, married or unmarried, to come along with them to the therapy, and there were others who had no women friends at all. Were these men to be penalised for not having sex partners willing to join them in their therapy? “These men are societal cripples,” Masters used to say. “If they are not treated it is discrimination of one segment of society over another.” So to treat them Masters and Johnson began to train female partners, sex surrogates, to work with them while under the guidance of the two therapists.

‘And the new treatment was extremely successful. In eleven years, Masters and Johnson used sex surrogates to work with forty-one single men. Of these, thirty-two had their sexual problems resolved, fully overcome, through the use of sex

surrogates. That’s an impressive record, and I can vouch for the means used because, in my previous activity elsewhere, I had one excellent surrogate who worked with five seriously crippled and sexually inadequate patients, and in every case their symptoms and failures were reversed and cured.

‘In 1970, as you may have read, Masters and Johnson gave up the use of sex surrogates altogether. It was said that one of their female surrogates, unknown to them, had a husband, and the husband sued Masters and Johnson for alienation of affection. Rather than go to court, and fuel a scandal for the media, Masters and Johnson made a legal settlement out of court and, after that, simply gave up the practice of using surrogates. I trust this will not be my predicament. From what I could learn about each of you, while three of you are divorced, not one of you is presently married. The other thing that disenchanted Masters and Johnson was the realisation that so many surrogates were not only working as surrogates, but were also trying to behave as therapists themselves. Of course, this is something I would never permit.

At any rate, as you know, sexual inadequacy is the greatest cause for divorce in the United States. William Masters discovered some years ago that of the forty-five million married couples in this country, half of them were sexually incompatible. The figures may vary somewhat today, but you and I know that something should and can be done to make troubled people healthier and happier.’

Freeberg leaned down to pick an ashtray off the floor, stubbed out his cigarillo and set the ashtray aside. This had served as a punctuation mark. He was ready to enter into a more specific outline of the training.

‘Now to your actual training,’ Freeberg resumed. ‘Your internship of six weeks will be under my supervision. You will be given a reading list of professional literature to cover. There will be added sessions in which I will question each of you more intensively on your earlier sexual experience and your responsivity to various adequate mates you’ve been involved with. I will attempt to teach you various counselling skills that you may need with your patients. You will receive thorough descriptions and demonstrations of male and female sexual functioning, to give you physiological knowledge and psychological insights. We will discuss, at some length, especially as it applies to poorly

performing males, their problem in playing spectator roles to their own performances.

‘But most important of all, you will each receive a complete course in surrogate sex therapy, learning and experiencing yourselves what your patients will experience. In fact, right now, without going into detail, I want to describe the steps, the exercises, you will be sharing with your patients.

‘You will be meeting with each patient perhaps three or four times a week, each session loosely limited to two hours. What kind of sexual dysfunctions can you expect to encounter? Sometimes the problems will be simple — a patient with low sexual desire, a person who is naive and socially frightened and isolated, or even a person who is still a virgin. But more commonly, with male patients, you’ll be dealing with a man who has erectile difficulties, one who is primarily impotent. You’ll be dealing with a man who suffers premature ejaculations. You’ll be dealing with a man who is unable to experience sexual pleasure. In the case of a woman patient, you may encounter a female who is nonorgasmic, one who cannot have a climax, even through masturbation. More challenging might be the case of a woman suffering vaginismus, which is a vaginal muscular spasm that makes sexual intercourse difficult or very painful.

‘How will you go about curing all these human dysfunctions? It really comes down to teaching a patient to be in touch with his own feelings and to be comfortable with intimacy. The client has come to you to be helped. The purpose of your job will be to develop, nurture, and secure an intimate relationship. It will involve sharing feelings and behaviours. This can be done only on a gradual basis, to remove the patient’s inhibitions and make him more aware of his sexuality and his partner’s sexuality. Many patients are in a hurry to get it over with, to get somewhere immediately. Many of the male patients are secretly saying to themselves, “What the hell, why do I have to go through all this preliminary nonsense? When will we get down to the real business?” But no matter what the client’s urgency, you, the surrogate, will have to remember that it is going to take time, and each patient must absolutely be made to understand that.

‘The whole process begins and continues in this manner. A problem patient is referred to me for ultimate treatment. First I see that the patient is examined by an MD to be certain he has no

physical disorders, for example, no hormone deficiencies, no disease. If the problem is not physical, I meet with the patient and listen to his full sexual history. Listening to this, I can usually pinpoint how things went wrong with the patient. I will ask him questions such as — when you were growing up was nudity allowed in the home? Was there much hugging, kissing, caressing, touching in your family? The answers to these questions are usually No. Later, maturing, the patient has his first sexual experience. It is usually negative. Then the patient is in trouble. In speaking to him, I try to calm him by explaining that fear and ignorance are strangling him, and that given help and time he can be free and sex can be as natural for him as breathing.

‘When it is your turn to take over as surrogates, and lend me assistance with the patient, you must understand that the ongoing reasons the patient is in trouble are twofold: first, he has difficulty communicating with other human beings; second, he has low sexual self-esteem. To solve these problems, you have to make the patient know you are caressing him not because you want to arouse him and bring him to orgasm, but because it is giving you pleasure. Since we are not a pleasure-oriented society, we don’t often allow ourselves to enjoy something nice unless we work for it. Most of us don’t experience pleasure for pleasure’s sake, without having to earn it or pay back for it. Your primary goal with a patient is to enjoy yourself and, in so doing, transmit the same enjoyment to another.

‘I told you that I take the patient’s sexual history, and talk things over with him. After that I try to match the patient with the one of you who might be most compatible with him. Knowing the patient’s age, education, social background, interests, I try to pair him up with the one of you who comes closest to fulfilling his needs. Then I personally brief you on the patient, and then I arrange a private meeting with the patient, the surrogate, and myself.

‘After that, I turn him over to you. I expect the assigned surrogate to give me a full report, usually on tape, sometimes in person, on each session as it is completed. Occasionally I will call a surrogate in to discuss the case, possibly make readjustments. Certainly I will meet with the patient regularly to find out how he feels about what is going on.’

Freeberg paused, and studied the surrogates seated before him and listening intently.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘what is going on? What you are doing with the patient is carrying out what you will be trained to do in the next six weeks. You will be doing a series of sensual exercises with the patient. We call each exercise a “sensate focus”.

‘Your first meeting, and every one after that, will take place in the privacy of your own home. This meeting will be half social, half work. The social part is to put a frightened guest at ease. You might offer the patient something to drink. Preferably tea or a soft drink. No alcohol. No stimulants. Remember, what you are trying to do is to tap into the patient’s own potential for exhilaration without outside help. The two of you have your refreshments and, fully dressed, you talk about — well, whatever you wish - food, sports, current events. You tell the patient a little about yourself, and get him to speak of himself. Try to alleviate his anxiety.

‘Finally, at that first session, you get to a hand caress. It is the least unnerving thing you can do. You are really focusing on the sense of touch. You begin by demonstrating a hand caress. You ask the patient to close his eyes, and you close yours, and you don’t talk. We don’t want any visual or verbal input to confuse the comforting hand caress.

‘During the next session you go to a face caress. You touch the various parts of his face, going smoothly, lightly, over every bump and crevice, fingertips on the face’s bone structure, the skin, the fuzz on it. You do this to the patient, and then he does it to you. It is amazingly relaxing and sensual. Incidentally, exercises need not be in rigid order. You can modify or change the order according to the situation or circumstances.

‘Anyway, at the third meeting, if all is going normally, you do a footbath. Literally a footbath. Clothes remain on, but feet are bared, soaked in warm water, and rubbed.

‘Not until the fourth meeting do you get into the initial nudity. You each undress yourself, or if you both wish, you undress each other. Usually, this isn’t a problem, but sometimes it’s not simple. Lots of people are used to undressing in the dark. As adolescents, they usually had not been troubled by being naked in a locker room, although some had worried about other boys whose penises were larger, who were hairier, or more muscular. And they don’t worry about being naked with a doctor or a nurse. But once they put on street clothes, and then have to take them off, it can be more difficult. Usually it isn’t too difficult since almost all men are

used to disrobing when they have sex, and no matter if it’s good or bad sex, they are used to being naked then.

‘So now you both have your clothes off. Now you do the exercise called body imaging. You, the surrogate, stand in front of a full-length mirror, allowing your patient to sit back and watch you, and you point out various parts of your body from head to toe and then honestly confess what you dislike or like about your anatomical self. Then your patient does the same. You learn a good deal about yourself and each other during this exercise.’

Freeberg paused again to draw another cigarillo out of his box and light it. He glanced at his digital watch.

‘I don’t want to exhaust all of you unduly, so I’ll go a little faster from here on. After all, everything I mention will be demonstrated to you in your training. Now, after body imaging comes the sensual shower — it can be a shower or a bath — together in warm water, and you lather one another and use soap as a lubricant. At the next session you do a nude back caress. Just what that implies. After that, the exercise of the frontal caress without touching breasts and genitals. This is followed by the frontal caress including touching each other’s breasts and genitals. But no big deal. Breasts and genitals get no more attention than touching the nose or the neck.