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Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate
It follows the life and work of Maureen Sullivan, a therapist who treats her sexually challenged male patients by having sex with them. It was made in the early-mid 80s, so safe sex is kind of a new idea. She almost apologizes when she asks her patients to get tested as a formality and laughs at the idea that they might have to use "rubbers."
Anyway, the part I was most intrigued by was not the whole notion of her profession, which is undeniably unusual, but the part of the documentary that covered Maureen's own therapy sessions. She and her therapist talk about Maureen's childhood and issues of not feeling loved by her father. Having witnessed his physical abuse of her mother, Maureen speculates that she's in sex therapy and teaches others how to love in order to learn herself. Her therapist says "That's part of the strength of your work, all the pain that you've had."
The therapist goes on: "Why is a forester a forester, or why is a gynecologist a gynecologist? Hopefully they are working out a lot of their own feelings. What is the voyeuristic quality of a photographer, for instance, and what is the photographer having to work out?"
My first instinct was to think, yea, all of those professions can trace back to some desire or hang-up in the professional, but here isn't anything like that for music. I'm in music because I'm nuts, for one, and because I just love it. But really, that isn't true. If I'm honest with myself, I'd ask myself why do I like literature, why did I try my hand at writing for a time? Communication, that's what I'm working out. Connecting with other people, with the bigger mystery, with reality. That's really what the performance of music is, the communion of ideas, sentiments, the sacred stuff not able to be captured by words. It's an attempt to get at reality. To return to my favorite Virginia Woolf quotation: "We are all sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality."
"What have you learned about human nature?" the documentarist asks Maureen, who says she's seen probably two or three hundred clients. She says with a knowing laugh, "That we're all in the same boat."
