Sexual Relationship

David E. Scharff, M. D., co-director of the International Institute of Object Relations Therapy, is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University, and a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. He has published extensively, is chair of IIORT Chevy Chase and Manhattan, and directs the two-year program in object relations theory and practice at IIORT Washington. Dr. Scharff is in the private practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy with adults, children, couples, and families in Chevy Chase.

Scharff shows how sexual union gives us the repeated opportunity to return to the source of our most profound instinctual needs so that we can find there the nourishment for emotional renewal through a harmonious interplay of our internal object relations. . . . Scharff sees patients with problems in sexually relating as needing help in finding out how to translate the problems into emotional equivalents that are susceptible to therapeutic change. . . . The family group offers the means of working through a second time in adulthood what went wrong the first time in childhood, by continued object seeking, finding, and repairing. It is the unique situation in which transferences can be creatively satisfied.