The Heart and Mind in Human Sexual Behavior - Review

Journal of Sex Research, May, 1999 by William E. Simon

The Heart and Mind in Human Sexual Behavior. By Alan Bell, Ph.D. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997, xx 388 pages. Hardcover, $35.00.

Reviewed by William Simon, Department of Sociology, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-3474.

The Heart and Mind in Human Sexual Behavior advertises itself as revealing a new and deeper truth regarding the meaning of the sexual in the lives of individuals. Unfortunately, little that is offered is particularly new and, for all its heated rhetoric regarding feelings and meanings, it doesn't probe very deeply. At best, this book can be described as better than average in an endless series of middlebrow exercises in pop psychology.

Like many such efforts, The Heart and Mind in Human Sexual Behavior begins with a disparaging of alternative approaches to the understanding of sexuality. Then, with equally improper haste, Bell references the several genre of therapies for the problematical aspects of sexuality that encourage many to seek either clinical help or the guidance of books such as this one. Bell implicitly promises to provide a deeper and more profound understanding of the sexual than that provided by surveys and varied forms of psychometrics. Similarly, he promises ways of problem solving that are more effective and enduring than those of previous approaches, such as Sexual Attitude Retraining or rational cognitive approaches. Unfortunately, little that follows comes close to keeping these promises.

The targets of Bell's most critical assessment are quantitative approaches, particularly the utilization of survey research methods such as those most closely identified with the Kinsey tradition. One can only wonder why it took him so long to come to this conclusion, suggesting that Bell may have never fully understood what such quantitative efforts were all about. For example, he writes that the richness and depth of the interviews he conducted in the course of teaching and clinical practice, which constitute the basis of the book, was instructive in just how much was missing from statistically based reports. Almost indignantly, he feels it is an affront that survey researchers (such as he and I once were) claim that they can define the American sexual scene.

The choice between quantitative methods and qualitative methods, both of which have been and remain sources of major contributions, is often a choice between knowing a little about a lot of persons or knowing a lot about relatively few persons. If one's interest requires being fully responsive to the marked pluralization of American social life, then being concerned with differences of age, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education makes survey research, for all it's limitations, extraordinarily useful. In the context of such relevant forms of diversity, the questions of age, variety of partners, and frequency of sexual activities can take on a powerfully suggestive significance. Perhaps it is this aversion on Bell's part that accounts for his general indifference to recent survey finding--findings that might otherwise provide a meaningful context for his own consideration of specific issues.

If, on the other hand, it is the specificities of experience, such as meaning and emotion, that are the focus of interest, then a looser, more ethnographic or quasi-clinical approach is clearly called for. However, even at this level of inquiry the questions of representativeness cannot be ignored. Does Bell, for instance, believe that the students and clients of his Bloomington practice provided a full articulation of sexual issues, allowing him to assume that he may be closer to describing the American sexual scene than those images created by the recent NORC surveys?

Moreover, even at the level of the thick description we were promised, the book is disappointing. Voices of clients and students too often turn out to be disembodied and decontextualized, achieving a measure of plausibility primarily in their very banality. Occasionally gender can be inferred, but little else gives any dimension to these anonymous voices, most of which do not go beyond two or three sentences. Many of the quotes take on an especially cliched quality. And while such cliches surely facilitate the lay reader's ability to recognize themselves, they also--like many cliches--often serve to obscure deeper or more complicated realities. Partly to compensate for this manifest superficiality, the reader is provided with "interludes" where issues are exemplified as they appear in the lives of four couples. But even these appear shallow, failing to communicate a sense of the textures of social life or the full richness of psychological life.

The early substantive chapters do substantially better than many of its competitors in pointing to the complexity of the psychodynamics that condition sexual identity, desire, and performance. For example, he notes, "Embedded in every sexual act is an entire history of how we account for our own and others' behaviors, an ideational trail that would make sense of every moment we live" (p. 45). This observation, though excessively overstated, clearly points to the complexity that underlies our sexual lives and that makes the achievement of the truth of our being--so important to Bell's view of the healing process--not easily accessible to even those with the most sincere intentions.