Sex therapy has changed very little since Masters and A. L. Johnson. Although direct and brief behavioral approaches to psychogenic sexual dysfunction began to appear in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Masters and Johnson’s work influenced psychotherapeutic approaches to this problem in a manner unprecedented for other psychological disorders. Anxiety is considered to play a role in the development and maintenance of sexual dysfunctions for both men and women by writers of virtually every theoretical persuasion. Unlike sexually functional subjects and organogenically impotent men, psychogenically sexually dysfunctional men consistently underreport sexual arousal. There is a wide agreement among clinicians that several types of cognitive activities have a marked effect on sexual arousal and therefore may play an important role in the genesis and/or maintenance of sexual dysfunction. It is possible that these cognitive activities operate through the mechanism of cognitive interference, or distraction.