Sex, perhaps surprisingly, is primarily centered in the brain. Theoretically, a disembodied brain, properly stimulated, could have sexual experiences. All feeling is located in the brain, though the sensation is extradited to the pertinent area of the body. It is important that it should be extradited, or felt, in the pertinent area. For example, if one’s foot should be pressing on cactus, it is surely to the advantage of the organism that the pain is felt in the foot which is indeed pressing on the cactus and not, say, in the left hand. Feeling the pain in the foot we remove the foot from the source of injury. This may seem hard to understand but there is a fairly well known phenomenon which should make it clear. Amputees, often, continue to feel sensations “in the limb” which is missing. He feels pain “in his foot” though the foot is gone. Similarly, all sensation is brain centered. It is then extradited, by tactual illusion, to the “area of sensation.” I mention this because it helps to understand the powerful role of the brain in the reception of, and control of, sensation. We feel not far from where we think. Indeed, in a sense, feeling is a form of thought, in the sense of constituting a meaningful conscious phenomenon. Confidence, mental attitude, are important. Mental context is important.

Without the brain there is no sex as we know it. This is one of the advantages, then, of imaginative sex. It recognizes the fantastic intricacy of the psychosexual apparatus and the interdependence of “mental” stimuli and “physical” performance. In enlisting the brain and thought, it is working not on something apart from sex but on the very home ground of sex. If the stimulation of the brain, if the efforts of the imagination, can produce better sex, this is not surprising. It is what one would expect. I am not entitled to, and I would not, propose imaginative sex as a therapy or cure for impotence or frigidity, but it seems to me not unlikely that it might have, relative to given individuals, efficacy in these respects. At any rate it would be worth a try. If it does not work, it is surely no worse off than other things which also to do not work. I would expect it, however, in some cases, to prove of value. On the other hand, even if it should remove blockages and lead to the pleasures of male and female orgasm, it is well to remember that that might well be no substitute for independent clinical inquiry and attention. If impotence and frigidity are not the disease but the symptom, imaginative sex would then only be effacing symptoms, leaving darker etiologies perhaps intact.