Educational Resource
Psychological Aspects of Natural Family Planning (1981)
Psychological Aspects of Natural Family Planning by Ronald Conway in International Review of Natural Family Planning, Volume V, Numbers 2 and 3, Summer/Fall 1981
There are two ways in which human beings entering into mating are distinctive with respect to the rest of creation. First, instinct in humans is so subordinated to psychological and social factors that it does not form the sorts of seasonal appetites for sexual union that occur among other mammals. The second difference, which is connected with the first, is that man is the only creature that puts value upon his sexuality.
It is precisely because this value-whether it be Christian, humanistic, or merely pagan-is placed upon sexual activity that the whole network of impulses and beliefs about the expression of sexuality has grown up. Some of them are valid; others have little biological foundation. Studies by the Kinsey Institute, Masters and Johnson, and several others have shown us that many of the sexual needs and drives that we imagined were innate have turned out to be conditioned or learned.
Ronald Conway is senior lecturer in applied psychology, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He delivered this address at the Sixth National Conference of the Australian Council of Natural Family Planning, Inc., in Melbourne, September 1979.