Chicago Seminar, 2016

If It Isn’t Sex/Porn Addiction, What Is It?
And How Do You Treat It?

CE Seminar with Dr. Marty Klein
July 9, 2016
2:00-5:15 pm
Columbia College, Chicago

The sex addiction movement addresses fundamental human issues: lust, desire, guilt, fantasy, decision-making, and the relationship of love and sex. The answers generated by this model, however, have important limitations–and for many people, they are disastrous. We will examine how patients’ impulsive or seemingly out-of-control sexual behavior may really involve:

* medicating their depression, anxiety, or anhedonia
* acting out hostility they can’t let into their consciousness
* an attempt to address an arousal disorder
* an attempt to deny a dystonic sexual preference or orientation
* a denial of existential despair
* fear of getting too close to primary partner
* a recurring sexual dysfunction
* inadequate attraction to or unspoken resentment toward primary partner

How can we best diagnose patients with problematic sexual decision-making? How can we treat them most effectively? Why does it matter what we call (supposedly) out-of-control sexual behavior?

We’ll also look at the new narrative of porn addiction, and how it is being used to support the idea that porn is now a public health problem (rather than an old-fashioned immorality problem).

* Does neuroscience really support this diagnosis?
* What are our options when a patient is convinced he’s a porn addict–or when he begs to be diagnosed (and treated) to appease his partner?
* How do we evaluate patients who seem to be using porn self-destructively?
* How can we treat these patients most effectively?

Early-bird rate expires June 25
Registration: https://goo.gl/78clG1

 

Dr. Marty Klein has been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for 35 years. The award-winning author of 7 books on sexuality, he was the first clinician to challenge the then-new diagnosis of “sex addiction.” Named by Wikipedia as a national leader opposing the sex/porn addiction movement, Dr. Klein appears frequently in popular media such as The New York Times, The Daily Show, and National Public Radio. He recently gave two Congressional briefings on evidence-based sex education.