Spilling their secrets

When Dr Brandy Engler went into business as a psychotherapist in Manhattan, she assumed that most of her clients would be women (her expertise was female sexual desire), and that building a clientele would be slow. Both assumptions were wrong.

“The calls started coming almost immediately,” says Engler. “And almost all of them were from men. They won’t seek the treatment they need for depression — or ask directions if they’re lost. But if there’s a problem with their penis, they reach out.”

Six years and 500 clients later, Engler, 37, is an authority on the alpha-male libido. Wealthy young banker, broker, and hedge-fund manager clients at her Times Square clinic led her to be branded “Wall Street’s sex therapist”. Psychotherapy is unfashionable (thousands of analysts are out of business), so she’s unusual in being granted access to “the inner sexual and psychological worlds of the rich and powerful”. Now, she’s telling what she’s learned.

More Carrie Bradshaw than Carl Jung, Engler is glamorous in an eccentric, boho-chic way. We meet in her new office on the outskirts of Hollywood (she moved from New York four years ago).

I should make myself comfortable, she says — that’s hard under the gaze of a woman whose trade is unravelling men’s dirty secrets.

Engler’s new book, The Men on My Couch, is a tour of the grubbiest nooks of the male psyche. Her clients — especially the swaggering high-achievers — are bullies in bed.

“Brutish and impersonal and exploitative,” is how Engler describes them. Sex is how they compensate for their shortcomings. It’s as if she’s dissecting the world’s Christian Greys — except that the hero of Fifty Shades of Grey, for all his sadomasochistic tendencies, is a gentleman compared with Engler’s clients.

“[Fifty Shades] is a female fantasy,” she says. Grey may spank Anastasia Steele, the book’s 22-year-old college-student heroine, but he’s “nurturing ... She’s the one who’s getting all the pleasure.” EL James’s hit novel “reflects a woman’s hunger for a certain aspect of masculinity that they’re not getting in their everyday life,” Engler says.

Engler’s book is a rogues’ gallery of carnal disasters. Paul is “a blustery alpha-male” banker who can’t handle a successful woman — a weakness he expresses through infidelity and exploitation. “I’m having trouble keeping it up [with his new wife],” he tells Engler. “So I’m having sex with prostitutes. I’ll give you five sessions to fix this.”

Then there’s heartbroken Charles, the head of an engineering firm. His fiancée cheated on him on the eve of their wedding and he has “eroticised that trauma” — he can now only have sex with his girlfriend if they role-play her being unfaithful to him with his best friend, his boss, his brother or his father.

If Engler’s clients are winners in the boardroom, they’re losers in the bedroom. (The problem is they recreate their work behaviour in the bedroom). They are sex addicts, philanderers, secret sadists.

Yet, Engler is fond of many of them. “What you should realise,” she says, “is that there is nothing particularly extraordinary about these people ... We’ve all got a little bit of sadism in us.”

Engler it seems is a modern therapist, she shares — a logical product of the Facebook epoch.

The job can be frightening: looking on while a disturbed male client vents his “raw, unbridled rage, quite frankly scares me”. She also describes the “dance” that opens a first session with a young, good-looking hedge-fund manager. (“Pelvis forward, legs open, arms spread, he ran his gaze up my legs and body,” she writes. “I met his eyes when they locked on to mine. This was obviously going to be a chess match.”) She developed a serious crush on Mark, a staff writer at a New York magazine. He was a nice guy, but his broken relationship with his mother compelled him to visit an S&M club — a “dungeon” where he paid to hurt “hog-tied” women. Such emotional entanglements between therapist and client aren’t unusual, Engler says. “What makes me atypical is admitting them.”

She is coy about her own sex life. She writes about a relationship with an ex-boyfriend, an older, enigmatic Middle Eastern businessman. The story arc suggests a journey from naive young woman with dreams of exotic romance to an understanding that love demands hard graft. She measured her relationship with this man against the four factors believed to boost female libido: “danger, novelty, distance and mystery”. But she says only that the sex was “super-passionate”.

She doesn’t say more because of her “super-conservative” parents, and “because I’m not an exhibitionist”. She grew up in Florida, the daughter of an insurance executive and a housewife, in a strict Pentecostal family. “And my husband [whom she married last year] is in politics and doesn’t want me to write anything about us. “He’s attractive because he is very charismatic, bold, a leader ... with a compassionate heart; a lovely form of masculinity,” she says.

Engler witnesses the effects of online pornography on her clientele. “The guy who suffers anxiety about asking women out ... I see a ton of that,” she says. “Now, they can go home, watch porn and get gratified. They don’t have to learn to overcome the anxiety and work out how to talk to women. They don’t develop, don’t grow.”

Engler sounds like Sigmund Freud when she says sex is a “repository of wishes, fears, old wounds and parts of self that want to be expressed”. Freud said sexuality began in infancy and that sex and personality were linked. Sexual impulses, he said, were instinctive and demanded expression and relief, but were kept in check by the ego (which strives to keep the instinctive id under control).

Freud viewed sexual symptoms as manifestations of deeper conflicts. Sex was never just about sex; treatment required the unearthing of underlying neuroses. People began talking about transference — the projection of feelings that originated in relation to one person (a negligent mother, possibly) onto another (a lover, perhaps).

Post-Freud, Alfred Kinsey conducted the first large-scale surveys of sexual behaviour in the United States. The result was Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, published in 1948, which exposed the gulf between what society deemed to be ‘normal’ and what we do. Kinsey said premarital sex, homosexuality — even bestiality — were all part of human existence. His conclusion? There’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ sex life.

Thanks to their insights, we have a fuller understanding of our collective sexuality, in all its freakish variety. The problem, says Engler, is that we act as if none of this happened: “Freud’s fallen out of fashion,” she says. While studying for her doctorate, she says she had to “beg to be taught about sex”. Psychotherapy, more than a century old, is rapidly losing customers.

An upshot of the analysts’ demise is the belief that men are in thrall to their chemistry, programmed to procreate unthinkingly and as widely as possible.

Viagra makes this thinking more potent. Why seek deeper psychological causes when a pill can cure your sexual problems? Erectile dysfunction was one of the main issues — along with compulsive sexual behaviour and infidelity — for the titans of Wall Street. But all of them, Engler says, were using sex as a substitute for hidden psychological drives. What emerged in the bedroom most often, she says, were deep-rooted and frustrated desires for personal power, affirmations of self-worth or affection.

Many of her clients felt they were missing something. To make themselves complete, some treated sex as a conquest. Others focused on perfecting their sexual techniques or used women like trophies. For others, the kick was domination.

Some will argue that Engler’s search for psychological explanations risks excusing immoral, weak-willed men. She denies that it does. “I want to change bad behaviour. I want to hold my clients accountable,” she says. “But to achieve that, they must gain insight. And to develop insight, we have to talk about the underlying issues.

“The point is to say: ‘OK, he was hurt as a child. Now what are you going to do with that? Are you going to treat women like objects? Are you going to walk around feeling impoverished, as if you need to take from everybody’?”

Many ancient cultures meditated deeply on sex (the Indians during the act, even). And 2,000 years ago in China, men were encouraged to subjugate their own gratification to that of their female partners. It was the Greeks and Romans, Engler says, who spoilt it all — by making sex a game of conquest and by denying that women are sexual beings.

These civilisations, she says, originated the idea that females should be subjugated. Sex became a win-lose proposition.

So the big question, perhaps, is can sex be made egalitarian again? Among her patients, Engler sees a few rays of hope. Take David, a philandering hedge-fund manager. When he first came to see her, he couldn’t bear to spend a single evening alone, he objectified the girlfriend he was thinking of marrying, and trawled bars behind her back, seeking endless one-night stands. After being treated by Engler, he realised he had been held captive by his narcissism — that his bad behaviour was a means of shoring up his insecurities. He found a new group of friends, quit the casual sex, and began learning to play guitar.

Engler, by retelling David’s story, seems to be arguing that there’s a germ of goodness in even the most dysfunctional client.

“When these men first come to see me, they’ll say all women are bitches, or they’ll warn me not to try to sell them the idea of meaningful love, or they’ll say they’re happy visiting their prostitutes,” she says. “The thing is, I think that they want me to fight with them; that they want me to prove them wrong.”

* Brandy Engler’s The Men On My Couch, €17.25, is published by Turnaround Books.