4
discovery through sex was so important it did not matter who the sexual part-
ner happened to be. He said "erotic love" shows us "We are all part of One; we
are One. This being so, it should not make any difference whom we love."6 So,
while Freud said it was bad to deny sex and Jung suggested sexual sin is part
of becoming whole, Fromm justified sex with anyone without regard to gender or
marriage.
Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers carried on from Freud, Jung and Fromm and
are responsible for the form of therapeutic morality most popular in American
culture today. Maslow said sex is part of the "essential core of the person"
and believed everyone must have sex to become fully "human." In his view,
people become "human" by "self-actualizing" themselves through sex. Thus
sexual abstinence was a "failure to grow one's potential" and something that
stunts "personhood."7 In fact, Maslow claimed the natural human capacity for
sex must be used or it will "atrophy" and diminish the person.8 This gave
everyone a moral duty to have sex, whether they are married or not, and made
restricting sex something as evil as withholding food from a someone who is
dying of starvation.
Like Maslow, Carl Rogers also thought everyone must have sex to be
whole, but Rogers went on to separate marriage from sexual morality complete-
ly. Rogers treated marriage as a social option, but he did not think it had
anything to do with deciding when sex is moral. For Rogers, sex had to do with
actualizing "life-enhancing" possibilities. He believed this made sex as ne-
cessary and moral for unmarried persons as for married and meant people could
be sexually active with different partners even if they were married. He also
decided the sexual instinct demands satisfaction "in ways that enhance, rather
than diminish, self-esteem,"9 which meant he thought sexual desires should be
satisfied in whatever form they arise.
Therapeutic sexual morality already has many strong advocates in the
culture, and in one generation has risen to become the dominant view among
liberal reformers in mainline denominations. In 1982, the Social Justice
6
Ibid., p. 55.
7
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Nostrand, 1968), p. 193.
8
Ibid, p. 201.
9
Carl R. Rogers, Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives (Delacorte, 1972), p.
214.