Overstreet...on Sexuality

Overstreet...on Sexuality:

'via Blog this'In The Mature Mind (1949), Harry Overstreet had some very important and insightful things to say about sexuality. Here are three quotes from him:

(p. 62) No one can be called sexually mature, it would seem, until he accepts his own sex nature without guilt; incorporates that nature in a rational life-plan; and is able to make sexual experience the basis of a sustained, mutually fulfilling, and creative relationship with the opposite sex.
A third fact regarding our sexual behaviors is only beginning to penetrate. This is the fact that sexual behaviors do not rise far above or fall far below the level of our nonsexual behaviors. Sex is one channel through which we express our character. It is not a thing apart from that character. We do not find, for example, that a person whose sexual behavior is marked by a will to dominate and exploit others is a person who, in other areas of his life, has a mature gift for equality. Nor do we find that the person who regards sex as filthy has, in other respects, a finely rational power to measure the worth of things. Psychiatrists are revising some of their first estimates regarding the role of sex. They are beginning to note that while it remains true that a traumatic sex experience can so arrest development that an individual’s whole relationship to life will be distorted, it is equally true that a traumatic experience in some other area of life will have a similar effect and will, in part, express itself through the channel of sexual behavior.