In memory of Bernie Zilbergeld 1939-2002 - Obituary

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2002 by Carol Rinkleib Ellison

Psychologist, author, and entertaining public speaker Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld died June 12, 2002, at his home in Oakland, CA. He succumbed to complications of diabetes, a condition that had afflicted him since his early 20s.

Bernie Zilbergeld, born in Freehold, New Jersey, on June 28, 1939, was the son of Jewish immigrants Sam and Clara Zilbergeld; his father owned a men's and boy's clothing store. Bernie did his undergraduate work at Ohio State University and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB).

In the 1970s, in the company of Lonnie Barbach, Rebecca Black, Harvey Kaplan and Jay Mann, Bernie was one of the original directors of clinical training in the innovative Human Sexuality Program of the University of California at San Francisco Medical School.

Bernie was an avid reader and gifted writer who further developed that talent by studying the craft, reading the works of others who wrote well and books on style and technique. Bernie Apfelbaum, whose acquaintance with the deceased began when then-graduate-student Zilbergeld took a UCB clinical psychology seminar that Apfelbaum was teaching, noted with awe the success of Bernie's 1978 book Male Sexuality. "No more-recent clone on men's sexual issues ever took off the way Male Sexuality did," Apfelbaum said. Updated as The New Male Sexuality in 1992 and revised in 1999, the book remains in print and has sold over a million copies.

Bernie dedicated the 1978 Male Sexuality to his father, "who was both father and mother and gave far more than he knew." (Bernie lost his mother to cancer when he was 10.) Bernie and I were personally partnered from 1976-1984, and I will treasure always that in the acknowledgments of Male Sexuality he gave me the following tribute: "as loving a friend and critical an unofficial editor as I could ever ask for." His sense of humor and his Fantasy Model--a major contribution to his readers and our field--are epitomized by his Chapter 3 title, "It's Two Feet Long, Hard As Steel, and Can Go All Night: The Fantasy Model of Sex."

Apfelbaum described Bernie as "entertaining," "clever," "funny," "angry," "sometimes arrogant," and "sometimes humble," and observed that "Zilbergeld was like a Ralph Nader" with respect to therapy, taking "the side of the common patient against the predatory therapist." Apfelbaum remembered an American Psychological Association symposium in which he, Bernie, Dan Wile, and I addressed the topic "Do we have to harm clients to help them?" This was in 1983, the year Bernie's book The Shrinking of America was released. The symposium, which he organized, was a significant presentation to a crowd overflowing out the door. It also reflected his gift for self-promotion; he was getting the word out about his new book, which took a critical look at psychotherapy. Arnold Lazarus noted in a back-cover blurb that "Zilbergeld persuasively challenges widespread myths about the need for and practicability of personal change." Bernie greatly admired Lazarus' multimodal therapy and other work; later they co-authored Mind Power: Getting What You Want Through Mental Training.

In 1980, Bernie and Michael Evans created quite a brouhaha in our field when, in an article featured on the cover of Psychology Today, they criticized Masters and Johnson for omitting outcome criteria from Human Sexual Inadequacy, the 1970 bestseller that essentially had launched the profession of sex therapy in America. Several challenges and responses followed, and in 1983, Forum editor Philip Nobile described Bernie the following way:

   a feisty, self-appointed ombudsman of sex therapy ... a controversial
   figure in the American sex establishment ... a whistle blower. He
   frequently criticizes the shortcomings of his colleagues and the
   pretensions of their claims. Since the science of sex is young and fragile,
   breaking rank in public is a deviate act. In the frontier atmosphere of
   sexology today, where reputations and research are often inversely related,
   skeptics like Dr. Zilbergeld are odd men out.

Near the end of his life, Bernie told his longtime friend and colleague Lonnie Barbach that he regretted having been so dramatically critical of Masters and Johnson. The criticisms were valid, he told her, but if he had his career to do over again, he would have dealt with them differently.

Among Bernie's other publications are the edited Hypnosis Questions & Answers and a chapter he and I coauthored on desire discrepancies and arousal problems in the first version of Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy. There we introduced our five-component model of sexual behavior, consisting of interest, arousal, physiological readiness, orgasm, and satisfaction.

Shortly before his death, Bernie submitted a completed manuscript to Bantam for a book on couples over 50 who are physically and sexually active both in and out of the bedroom. He felt very good about having finished this project and told me that Bantam would be releasing his book posthumously sometime in the next year.