My thanks to Psychology Today for the invitation to join PT's sexuality blogging team.

I'm honored to be joining my distinguished sexuality colleagues on these pages. I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you about a realm of psychology that I find endlessly fascinating.

There are few areas of medicine, psychology, or psychiatry where one can learn so much about human experience as in the sexuality field. I've been in practice for more than 20 years as a psychotherapist and psychiatrist in New York City, specializing in the treatment of couples and individuals with sexual issues. Every evening I leave my office with my head full of things my patients have taught me that day, regretting that I lack the time to put most of it down on paper. I hope in these pages to share with you some of what my daily work privileges me to learn about the mysteries and complexities of human sexuality.

Not your father's sex therapy

When sex therapy first got going in the 1960's, it consisted of simple behavioral techniques, such as showing couples how to relax together. But things have changed. Most sex therapists today, including myself, now see our primary goal as helping people understand the activity of their sexual minds. It's a more complex endeavor - and requires many more skills.

Once one moves away from behavioral sex therapy and instead focuses on sexual minds, one recognizes that we are quite diverse as a sexual species -- different in our sexual temperaments, and in the meanings we attach to sexual experiences. But we're all extraordinarily sensitive to subtle cultural messages about sexuality - messages that we all follow unconsciously.

Nowhere is this more true than in the differences between men and women. The big discovery fifty years ago about men and women's sexuality was how similar they were in terms of their biology. The big advance recently has been a clearer understanding of how different women and men are in their sexual psychology and their experience of sexuality. It's a challenge, however, for a sexuality writer to discuss gender differences without losing sight of the diversity within each gender - or of the fact that many individuals diverge from "typical" maleness or femaleness.