Sex & Belonging: On the psychology of sexual relationships

By Tony Schneiderstralian Academic Press 2019

Reviewed by Jim Amundsen, PhD

Sexuality looms very large in the theories of Al Pesso. As Pesso put it to me once, “Human motivation is like a coaxial cable: it has many strands, but one of them is always sexuality” (personal conversation). In Pesso’s thought the ubiquitous quality of sexuality is based in its function to keep the species alive. However, many of us in PBSP have yearned for a fuller understanding of human sexuality. For example, this understanding doesn’t explain things like homosexuality or the experience of sex as being just plain fun. It is in this light that I can happily recommend to the PBSP community Tony Schneider’s book, Sex & Belonging. Just as it sounds, his concept of “belonging” is identical to Pesso’s concept of the basic need for “place.” As Schneider puts it, “Probably one of our most powerful drives is the desire for ‘home’, the place where we belong and where others agree we belong” (p.1).

The basic structure of Schneider’s theory is the demand that everything about us is constructed out of our biology, our social interrelatedness and our history of the dialectical relationship with the biological and social. In this perspective it’s never “nature” or “nurture”, it is always both. His model proposes that human sexuality is comprised of sexual arousal, sexual desire and interpersonal sexual attraction. The sexual arousal phase is the basic biological response that fits with Pesso’s notion of sexuality. The definition of sexual arousal is simply a genital response to some stimuli. Upon this basic biological platform develops a very complex combinations of drives. Schneider catalogs two basic types of drives in human sexuality. These are biological drive profile (BDP) factors and subjective drive profile (SDP) factors. The biological drive aspects are, simply put, Pavlovian in nature. As he puts it, “…an animal learns to be sexually aroused by things that happen to be associated with sexual arousal” (p.45). In this way even the basic biological aspects of sexuality are affected by our histories.

When it comes to subjective drive profiles (by profiles he means what in PBSP we would call “maps”) there is an exponential increase in complexity. Much of his book describes 22 different subjective drive profiles that can motivate sexual behavior. He points out that the reward involved in the actual sexual act (orgasm) is in fact very brief compared to the rewards of the subjective drive profiles. The SDP include themes of pleasure and desire, themes relating to broader social needs, and relationship-need themes. All of these themes have several sub-themes that he elucidates. He includes another set of SDP’s which are inhibitory themes, such as needs for protection and social inadequacy (which refers to a sexually desirable person not fitting in with one’s community).

Finally, there are sections on how socio-cultural scripts interact with all of the above. These would include things like changing gender roles, the availability of reliable birth control and other wider social contexts which our sexuality is formed in.

The book is not overly technical and not overly long. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to explore human sexuality in more depth and who also follows the premises of PBSP theory.