Emotionally Disturbed Behavior

Abstract

It is difficult to define sexual disturbance today because concepts about emotional disturbance in general and sexual disorder in particular have recently undergone signify cant changes. Sexual disorders may be seen in terms of (a) specific aberrant acts or (b) the psychological and philosophic causes that underlie such acts. It would appear to be more meaningful to define them largely in relation to the self- defeating ways in which and reasons for which an individual behaves sexually rather than in terms of the concrete behaviors he performs. When so viewed, the basic causes of sexual disorders seem to be quite the same as those of most general emotional difficulties. Societal reaction to disturbed indi viduals with sexual problems has improved in recent years but is still much too condemnatory and punitive. At the same time, some social thinkers, in a misguided effort to pre vent the persecution of sexually troubled and deviant individuals unrealistically...